Collection Summary: An interview of Michael Spafford and Elizabeth Sandvig conducted 1992 September 2-4, by Paul Karlstrom, at their home in Seattle, Washington, for the Archives of American Art. Spafford and Sandvig discuss their marriage and their separate careers, and the controversy and trial resulting from Spafford's "Labors of Hercules" murals at the Washington State Capital Assembly Chamber in Olympia.

Biographical/Historical Note: Michael Spafford (1935- ) is a painter and sculptor from Seattle, Washington. Spafford married painter and sculptor Elizabeth Sandvig in 1959.

This interview is part of the Archives of American Art Oral History Program, started in 1958 to document the history of the visual arts in the United States, primarily through interviews with artists, historians, dealers, critics and administrators.

Funding for the digital preservation of this interview was provided by a grant from the Save America's Treasures Program of the National Park Service.

How to Use this Interview

The transcript of this interview is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Michael Spafford and Elizabeth Sandvig, 1992 September 2-4, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

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Interview Transcript

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Michael Spafford and Elizabeth Sandvig, 1992 September 2-4, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with Michael Spafford and Elizabeth Sandvig
Conducted by Paul Karlstrom
At their home in Seattle, Washington
September 2 and 4, 1992

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview
with Michael Spafford and Elizabeth Sandvig on September 2 and 4, 1992. The
interview took place in Seattle, WA, and was conducted by Paul Karlstrom for
the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview

SEPTEMBER 2, 1992

[Session 1, Tape 1, Side A (30-minute tape sides)]

PAUL KARLSTROM: An interview with Michael Spafford, Elizabeth Sandvig in Seattle
in their home on September 2, 1992. This is tape one. The interviewer for the
Archives is Paul Karlstrom.
As I said earlier on, doing an interview like this with two respondents-interviewing
two people at the same time-is a little unusual for our oral history program.
But I think it's very appropriate in this case because you're married, you're
both artists with your own careers. You've been married since, if I'm not mistaken.
. . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: 1959.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: 1959.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So that's a good number of years that you, in your relationship,
have evolved. You've moved, you've been in different places, but also your careers
in some parallel way, at least in terms of proximity, have evolved. What I would
like to do, and hopefully I can be artful in terms of the questions, is try
to learn a little bit about both of you. Maybe we could start out by each of
you giving a bit of your own backgrounds. Liz, you were born in Seattle. And
then Michael, you were born in. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Palm Springs.

PAUL KARLSTROM: That's right. Lived in Southern California for quite a while.
And maybe you could take turns sort of filling that in, bringing us up to that
time that you met at Pomona College. And then we can just sort of develop it
from there. So whoever wants to. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Would you like to go first, dear?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Oh, well, let's see. I'll try and keep this fairly short.
I was born in Seattle and I lived here until I was three or four years old.
My mother [Mauda Margaret Polley-Ed.] had been married for seven years to my
father [Arnold Sandvig-Ed.] before I was born. She had been a librarian. She
was a British immigrant and she was brought up in Chehalis. She came to the
Northwest when she was like six years old. My grandfather [Thomas Edgar Polley-Ed.]
was an optometrist and his wife [Mauda F. Drew-Ed.] was American. She stayed
for a short time in Chehalis and then moved to San Francisco. She couldn't stand
it in Chehalis.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Excellent taste. [laughs] Oh, no!

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: My mother read every book in the library by the time she
was sixteen and then went to college at Berkeley where she got a degree in Spanish.
She had a great love for Spain. My grandfather was also fascinated with Spain
and things that were Spanish; I know that they took several trips and she ended
up teaching English in a girl's school in Spain. Then later she got a degree
in library science at Columbia. And so she worked in Seattle for the public
library. I know when I was little that my father was a boat builder-that is
at least he built his own cruiser-and he was in the Coast Guard, and he played
the drums. He was the youngest of seven children and a Norwegian, probably the
first child born in the United States, immigrated from Minnesota or someplace
like that. And they were probably farmers. The only recollections I have of
the family on my father's side is, I had an uncle who was a union leader-or
a teamster, rather. My parents separated when I was about four or five or six,
and we went to Washington, D.C. It was wartime and we lived in like lots of
different places. And we stayed in Washington, D.C. except for a year when we
were in Elmira, New York, and my mother taught Spanish at a women's college.
And from back in Washington, she joined the foreign service in, it must have
been, 1950. She had been working for the State Department. We went to Mexico
in '51, and I went to public schools. In Mexico, I went to private school, and
I went from being a typical, ordinary child-although I already had an interest
in art. And that's because of the Phillips Collection, the Corcoran, the Smithsonian,
eating lunch in the State Department because they had an aquarium in the basement.
That's all I vaguely remember.
And I took classes from a Quaker school-in art. In Mexico, I took private art
classes from a man named Robin Bond who was British who had taught in a school
for disturbed children in England. And when we went to Mexico, it was the time
when it was full of expatriates who had left the United States because of the
war.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Now, you were in Mexico City, is that right?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Um hmm. In 1951 we went, by train. I remember that. Mexico
at that time was very manageable. It was a city of seven million, very exciting.
My mother hoped that I would be bilingual, which it was too late by that time,
but I learned as much Spanish as I could.
And when it came time to go to college, I wanted to go to art school, but I
wasn't really sure about it. I didn't have too much contact with it, so being
from a family where education was important, I went to Pomona College. And I
met Mike in the second year. I went as an art student. I already knew [that
I wanted to be an art major-Ed.], although I did a lot of different things.
I had done a lot of different things in high school-everything from writing
to acting to. . . . That's why it was so great, because there were so many opportunities
in _____.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Excuse me, why did you choose Pomona from way down there in
Mexico City?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: It seemed close.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Aside from the fact that it's a good school.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Actually it seemed so close. There were only. . . . I think
there were three places that I considered: Stanford, Pomona, and I can't remember;
there must have been some place else. But I wanted a place that was small, liberal
arts, coeducational. There weren't that many, when you came down to it. I didn't
want to go to a big state school. I didn't think I could manage it.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Or a woman's school, I guess.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: No, I didn't want to go to Scripps or. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Or most of the Eastern private schools.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, then I suppose the Eastern schools probably would
have been more natural in one way, except that I lived across the street in
Washington from Holton Arms, which is a private girl's school and I was quite
aware. . . . And I had my music lessons around the corner at some other private
school. I was quite aware of all the embassy children and the kinds of lives
they lead and the amounts of money that they had. And you have to remember at
that time in Washington, we didn't have a car. My mother didn't know how to
drive. I took the bus everywhere. I had an incredible amount of freedom but
not very much money, and it was still, at least at that time, people changed
their clothes every day when you came home from school. You changed your clothes
and then you went out and did whatever you wanted to, but my best friends were
Chinese and I would go after school to this Chinese laundry and have a good
time turning socks into little balls. [laughter]

PAUL KARLSTROM: That's creative.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And delivering newspapers and things like that, and it was
just a different kind of life, so that going to Mexico was a big shock, actually.
Incredible amount of money that people had-you know, parties, and the receptions,
and the contrast between the people that had nothing. Because I certainly wasn't
aware in Washington of people that had nothing. When I went to school, there
were hundreds of immigrants coming, and they had English classes after the regular
school day where they learned to speak English, all these immigrants. They might
have been poor, but it wasn't the kind of poverty that you had in Mexico. It
certainly wasn't so visible. Maybe there were more jobs then, too, for people.
I mean, like all those wartime jobs. I still remember the women wearing the
hair up in nets and scarves and the girls painting their legs with leg paint
because there weren't any nylons.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Because they couldn't have nylon.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: But Mexico was quite different. It was very exciting. We
lived for three months in a hotel, and then we moved into a house at what seemed
like the end of nowhere, with no car because somebody wasn't quite really thinking,
so we had difficulty with transportation for a few years. And then we moved
further back in the city until finally we ended up right downtown in Mexico
City. And it was great. You know, it couldn't have been nicer, couldn't have
been better.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So you went off to Pomona with the intention to study art?
This was your interest.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes.

PAUL KARLSTROM: And this was in, what did we say, fifty. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Fifty-five.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So what were your expectations? You know, a young woman at
that time looking at an art career. Were you thinking of it as a way ultimately
to make a living?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I had absolutely no idea of a career. I had absolutely no
idea of how you made money. The only job I'd had was transcribing tapes from
a Dictaphone of a book in Spanish that was being translated into English in
the basement of a room in Mexico City College and where I wasn't paid with money.
I got paid with tuition credits in the summer. So I didn't think that I would
be able to suddenly become a painter and sell paintings, but I thought that
there would be something that I could fit into. But I really didn't think about
it. I was very, very short-sighted. I think my mother thought about, it and
she was absolutely sure that I had to learn how to do something that I could
get paid for and to support myself. So that was always understood-that every
woman, every child has to be able to support themselves. But I also had, at
least at the time, a great deal of confidence, for that.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Did you sense any special attitudes towards women spending
their time. . . . You know, when you do it at college, presumably you have some
real serious interest in the field? Do you remember any attitudes, perhaps some
surprise, when you would tell people what you were doing, that you were studying
art, majoring in art?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: No.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I mean, did this seem to them a perfectly normal thing to do?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Perfectly natural. Perfectly natural, normal thing to do.
There wasn't this feeling of anxiety about what you're going to do. It was sort
of like, "What are you going to do?" "Oh, that's fine. That's
nice. That's interesting." Because there was also the idea, well, once
you got a degree, you could certainly do something, and whether you became a
teacher. . . . And that's, in a way, when I graduated from college and my mother
realized that I couldn't do anything that was of economic, immediate viability,
I went to Harvard and got a teaching certificate in teaching art. They had a
one-year program. So there I would be guaranteed there was something I could
do that would earn money. And supposedly I could always do this. Actually, I
didn't like it. So I thought there were lots of other things I would prefer
to do. But I didn't have the idea, I never had any idea of becoming a career.
. . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Fine artist.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: No. No, the idea was to become a fine artist. The idea was
just to become a painter or whatever, just to make art. It wasn't. . . . Because
there were lots of people in Mexico that that's what they did. And either they.
. . . Maybe they did a little television. Maybe they did a little set designing.
Maybe they did a little fashion illustrating. And maybe they had several jobs-because
that was certainly true-and a little teaching. But there was never the idea
that you couldn't do anything. Because you were so much better educated than
most of the people that. . . . And most of the people that I knew didn't have
much money but they certainly had lots of different talents and they used them
as best they could. Later, it was after school, I mean, like when we lived in
Mexico, I sold paintings in the park on Sunday to tourists. And that was fun.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Just like Paris.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: We couldn't live very well from that but it was certainly
a help. And there were other people there that that was their primary income.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So you ended up a professional artist early on, anyway, just
by yourself. I mean, by definition.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes. And actually I always thought that if you just sort
of minded your own business that things would come to you. Now, that wasn't
quite right. You know, that if you just do your work, people will seek you out.
That isn't necessarily true anymore. I think it's much more difficult.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Let me ask a question because we're now at that point where
your lives converge at Pomona. Is it true that you [MICHAEL SPAFFORD] had been
in an accident? I read about this.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Uh huh.

PAUL KARLSTROM: And then you finally recovered enough to return to classes
and you found that your studio had been given away. Is that true? And Liz was
the one that ended up with your studio space? Or is that apocryphal?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: You've got to understand that at Pomona you didn't really
major in art; you had an interest in art and you had a liberal arts education.
So, you had a certain number of credits that you could take in art, and these
would be split equally between art history and the practice of art. So what
most of us did was we retained very few credits in painting or whatever it was
we were taking in studio courses, and we'd spend a lot of time doing it. So
eventually we got to a point where we'd take a half a credit of painting and
spending hours doing it. So what we did was we had a tendency to stake out little
areas in the building where we could come at night and work. It wasn't like
they were specifically studios but they were just sort of spaces. And I had
a space which-and I was out a whole semester-so when I came back, there was
this stranger-very attractive stranger-in this space, and if I remember correctly,
there was something to do with carrot sticks. She offered me carrot sticks and
that's how we became, well, friendly. But I can't recall exactly.

PAUL KARLSTROM: The carrot and the stick, huh?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right, that's right. [laughs] But at that time I don't
think I was particularly interested in Elizabeth as an object of desire or anything.
It was just she was another person that I hadn't met before. I had other girls
that I was interested in. I also remember talking to Elizabeth later, and she
said that she wasn't the least bit interested in the types of boys that went
to Pomona. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Right.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . because they wore glasses and. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: They all wore glasses.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . they studied, and she was more interested in. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I was thinking of transferring. [laughs] To someplace that
you might have thought I might have gone in the first place, like the University
of New Mexico. Closer. That was one of the main problems I had at Pomona was
I'd had a great shock when I saw all these people with blue eyes. I was extremely
homesick.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: For Mexico.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: For Mexico, yes. And so I went back every summer. But eventually
I got used to everybody with glasses. I got used to the blue eyes.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, and then also you have to remember that at that time-and
maybe even later-I wasn't considered one of the major talents in the school.
I had a certain confidence because I had gone to junior college ahead of time
so I was a little bit more experienced than some of the other people in the
program, but just in terms of going to school.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: [You worked, too.]

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: But there were lots of other students who were considered
better artists, and actually there were quite a few wonderful people there at
that time, including what's his name, the Dr. Kildare?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Oh, Richard Chamberlain.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Richard Chamberlain.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Really. He was studying art?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: He was studying art, and he primarily painted. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Paintings.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . sailboats I think.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Like Feininger. Um hmm.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: But he was also very interested in the theatre.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Oh, he was wonderful in the theatre.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah. And so I remember even now when you read interviews
about him, he says he wishes he could get back to his painting because it's
still a hobby of his.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I'll be darned.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: He wasn't particularly important or thought of as a particularly
important student either at that time, but there were some interesting. . .
.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I can't think of who was.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, somebody like Martin Green, for example.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, see, I don't remember him at all.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: You don't recall him. But anyway, and then there were really
interesting people like Ed [Avak], and the young man who went to the monastery.
They were very bright and very intense and very nonmaterial in the way they
thought about things.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Right. And there were a lot of people like Paul Harris,
who were intelligent and did wonderful work.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Wonderful. Mowry Baden who is still. . . . Actually he's
a person who is the type of person that you should interview, too, because he's
in Canada now. He's been a landed immigrant, and he teaches at the University
of Victoria, but he's still a United States citizen. He's a wonderful artist.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: His sculpture is mostly shown. . . . He does installation
pieces like what? University of California at Santa Barbara, San Francisco?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, there was that, but he's still written about in the
New Yorker. I mean, he has quite a wonderful reputation. At the same time, he's
not as well known as, say, somebody like Bob Morris or people like that who
might do some of the same sorts of things. But he would be great. But anyway,
they were all there and they were all very assertive, and my introduction to
art came in a totally different way from, say, yours, because you-I'm saying
Elizabeth-because she was sort of introduced to art through fine art. And you
talked about the Phillips, and I grew up in a small city in Southern California.
The finest art was in the L.A. County Museum at that time, which shared the
art with dinosaur [bones].

PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And from what I understand, most of the paintings were questionable
in terms of their authenticity.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: No, no. And so my take on art was more commercial art. And
is it [the tape recorder-Ed.] working or. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Um hmm.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Oh, okay. [laughs] But anyway, that would be my history,
and I'll do that when I start.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: You should tell them about, before you came to Pomona, though,
that you did cartooning.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right. I worked for an advertising agency for seven
years. That's how I put myself through school. Basically, I think I'm still
that type of an artist. [chuckles]

PAUL KARLSTROM: Let's do that, if we may, just go back and then quickly lay
in your own background, and then I might say this. . . . You know, some basic
information such as Liz gave me. It is also interesting to hear sometimes remarks
or recollections that just come to you which may not appear in the usual bio
sheet.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, I don't know how personal you want this to be. There
are certain things that I never have written about me when they write these
little brochures and things like that, and it has to do with my health. And
I don't know, is that interesting to this sort of thing?

PAUL KARLSTROM: Absolutely. I mean, this can be and should be as biographical
as we want to make it. And there's really nothing outside of. . . . This is
your tape. How's that?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Right. Well, I'm not exactly sure. . . . I don't have complete
recollections of my childhood. We just went down to visit my mother [Sarah Alice
Maloney-Ed.] who's eighty-one. She lives in Newport Beach and she has recollections
of my childhood that are quite different from mine. And I think she's probably
more accurate. But I'll tell you what I remember, at least what I was told.
I was born in Palm Springs and I already had an older brother [Alan-Ed.]-and
then I later had a younger brother [David-Ed.]. And at that time my mother was
married to a man named Cutshaw. I forget what his first name was [Robert, Alan's
father-Ed.]. And that was an Anglicized version of Gottshalk. His father apparently
had something to do with a newspaper in Long Beach and was a political figure
and all that sort of thing. And so you'd assume that he was also my father,
but apparently he wasn't. But I wasn't told this until I was in my thirties.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Really!

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: So I just assumed for many years that this man was my father.
And I also assumed, because of his name, that he was Jewish. And my mother was
an Irish Catholic. And her father [Samuel Maloney-Ed.] was a member of the IRA,
at least that's what she says. [laughs]

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And her mother [Ethel Elizabeth Rumberg-Ed.] was a fortune
teller.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Kind of romantic.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, we're not sure about all of this, you see.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: We're not sure if this is true. And she had a half-brother
[William Hall-Ed.] who was the only person in either family that was ever known
to be artistic, and he was a forger, and he spent most of his life in prison.
[chuckles]

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: In where?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Someplace in California. Chico? Is there a prison in Chico?
Now what's that red light mean?

PAUL KARLSTROM: That's telling us that pretty soon it's going to go over, and
so why don't we be over? Why don't we just stop it?

[Session 1, Tape 1, side B]

PAUL KARLSTROM: This is an interview with Liz Sandvig, Michael Spafford, tape
one, side B. We were talking, having heard something about Liz's background,
getting her to college and beyond, then we were hearing now, Michael, a little
bit about your own background leading up to the time that you two met and started
your lives together.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Right. Anyway, I was born in Palm Springs as I said. And
as I found out later, the man who I assumed was my stepfather, Lynn Spafford,
was actually my father. But obviously he wasn't married to my mother when I
was born. I was adopted by him-legally adopted by him-and so was my older brother,
six years after I was born. And so my birth certificate and everything has his
name on it.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Spafford?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: So there's no record of. . . . As Spafford, right? So I guess
I should have known then that there was something going on, but I didn't. I
just assumed that this was just to make everybody feel better. I never felt
terribly close to Spafford, and I think that's partially because my mother got
to a point where she wasn't too fond of him. I guess he was a bit of a womanizer.
He was very independent. He was quite a bit older than she was. But he apparently
was very, very financially supportive of everything that the family wanted to
do. Like I say, he was a business person. He was a small business person. He
ran a grocery store in Palm Springs. I learned later-actually my mother just
told us that last week-that he had a nightclub. I didn't realize that. He had
a grocery store in Lake Arrowhead, so we used to go up there in the summers
and spend time. Obviously, I had contact with a lot of people who also had money,
although I didn't think about it at that time. I worked in the grocery store
when I was a young man. The thing that I think that sort of bothered my mother,
and actually ultimately led to a nervous breakdown by her, was the fact that
when I was six years old, I was diagnosed as being diabetic. We were living
in Banning at that time, and previous to that time, according to my mother.
. . . Let's see, after we moved from Palm Springs, we went to some place like
Seal Beach or some place on the coast. I was having difficulty in a respiratory
way, so they moved to the desert. And in Banning I think I got very, very fat,
and for whatever reason, anyway, I was diagnosed as. . . . I know, I was diagnosed
as having rheumatic fever. I had a functional heart murmur, which I still have,
which is not serious, but it was diagnosed at that time as being rheumatic fever,
and that was serious, so they kept me in bed. And when I was in bed, I gained
a lot of weight. I had very little exercise. And then I was diagnosed as being
diabetic. And at that time, which would have been, what, 1941, that was pretty
serious. And as a matter of fact, I think it had only been seven or eight years
previous to that time that they had discovered insulin as something to do. So
before that time, you just existed on lettuce until you died, you know. It was
always fatal. And at any rate, I think this idea of me being ill played against
the minds of both Spafford and my mother. I think they probably felt. . . .
I'm sure my mother felt that she was being punished. She had very, very strong
upbringing in the Catholic Church, and she dropped it at that time, and she
became a Christian Scientist. And Spafford, I think, was a Baptist. And there
was a whole lot of. . . . They were trying all kinds of spiritual responses
to deal with the fact that they had what they thought was a fatally ill child.
I was taken to Loma Linda, which is a Seventh Day Adventist hospital in-it [wasn't,
was] in Loma Linda; it's somewhere in California-and they did a lot of tests.
When my mother had her nervous breakdown, I must have been eleven or twelve,
and I was taken to the Scripps Metabolic Clinic which is down in LaJolla, California.
I remember playing a lot of Canasta with elderly diabetics that were so thin
they could hardly move. And I thought, "Oh, my God! There's me." No,
actually I had a pretty good time. It had a wonderful view of the coast and
everything. But one of my really strong memories of who I thought was my stepfather
at that time was he actually was driving me down to Loma Linda in his pickup.
He had an old pickup. We were driving from Riverside because we were living
in Riverside at that time, and he cried the whole time. And that was a real
shock to me because he must have been at least in his fifties at that time,
and it just isn't a thing you expect a grown person to do.

PAUL KARLSTROM: This was about you?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, that's what I think now. At the time I thought it was
because Alice, my mother, was in a sanatorium and having difficulty just dealing
with reality. So I assumed that this was why he was so upset, but I know now
it was because he thought he was going to take me down there and that was it.
It was sort of like that's the final place. And I probably was going down to
be regulated, what they call regulated. And I came out of. . . . I don't know
how long I spent down there. Seemed like years but it was probably only a month
or so. And I came out and I still wasn't regulated, and I was diagnosed as being
a brittle diabetic, which means that you go up and down but you can never stabilize.
At that time, that was considered the worst type of thing to be because the
side effects-blindness and having your limbs amputated and stuff like that-was
a question of not being able to keep things stable.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So you had this hanging over. . . . You knew this?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: No, I don't think I did.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: You knew it by the time you were a teenager.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, that's true because actually I. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: You knew it by the time I met you.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right. [laughs]

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: He kept trying to scare me.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, I didn't want her to marry me because I was told. .
. . I'm sure this is true, but I can't recall what the circumstances were. I
was told that I wouldn't live past forty. Or I probably wouldn't be functional,
even before that time. And this was told to me by a doctor or a nurse as a way
of preparing me for the eventualities of things. In other words, enjoy yourself
while you can. [laughs] And then I remember always thinking, sort of focusing
on the fact that when I was forty, that was it. And as a matter of fact, when
I reached-I'm fifty-six now and I feel just fine-when I reached the age of forty.
. . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: You're regulated.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: No, I'm not. I'm still going up and down but I'm obviously
very fortunate. I have very few side effects and the ophthalmologist that I
have look at my eyes every six months says that if he didn't know he wouldn't
even know I was diabetic. So I'm really lucky. I'm just lucky. But at the same
time it was sort of like after I was forty I had to start all over again, because
I was so focused on that being the time that everything would just sort of stop.
I have a friend, Mike Daily, who is a wonderful painter. He came to the University
of Washington the same year I did, 1963. And he had developed. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Sixty-five.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Sixty-three. The year Michael [Michael Andrew Spafford (son)
also known as the artist/photographer Spike Mafford-Ed.] was born.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: You're right, you're right. [chuckles]

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: He came from the University of Iowa. He developed MS about
eighteen years ago, maybe even longer. Multiple sclerosis has a way of sort
of attacking someone and then it backs off and then it goes into remission.
And when he first got it, it just knocked him flat. I mean, it was like he couldn't
move. He was in bed; he didn't have any control over any of his bodily functions.
It was a nervous thing that it was like. . . . It was such a surprise to him
that he-well, he's never said this to me-I knew that he just sort of thought
he was going to die. So he got better and he's quite wonderful now. I mean,
he gets tired and all that sort of thing and it is a progressive disease, but
he's still teaching and he still works to the extent that he can. But at that
time he thought that he just had a couple of years left, and so you could see
the change in his work. He didn't, in a sense, move in any direction; he just
stayed in the same place and kept doing as much as he could, because he thought
that that was sort of where. . . . He wanted to make sure that he sort of plumbed
that, or dug that hole deep enough that he was involved in digging when he got
sick. But as the years went on, he realized he was going to live a lot longer,
so he's now. . . . [laughing] I mean, this is sort of privileged information,
but he's actually making a lot of. . . . For him would be sort of risky moves
in his paintings, because he once again has this feeling-it's not immortality
exactly-but at least the feeling that if you do something you'll be able to
keep doing it for a while.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Or if you mess up, it doesn't matter.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right, that's right. [laughs]

PAUL KARLSTROM: It seems apparent to me from your citing this particular case
that you see some analogy to your own experience. I mean, you've told this story
in a way that suggests when you were a teenager-certainly by the time you were
a teenager-you had been told, believed, that your time was limited, and there
was even a specific date. Now it's true that forty sounds ancient when you're.
. . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, thirty or thirty-five is what you told me.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, thirty-five is. . . . They told me that probably what
would go first would be my eyes and then my mind. And that was really scary,
because I always thought of myself as being primarily mental rather than physical,
although I did participate in some sports, like tennis and _____.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, it sounds to me as if this condition and your awareness
of it looms very, very large in terms of those years.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Actually, it still does in my mind.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, [you, you know I] obviously can't help but ask then certain
questions relating to that. One of them, of course, would be the impact: the
effect you feel this knowledge-this awareness of your condition-had on choices
you made, perhaps even in terms of what you wanted to do. Eventually become
an artist, although you're going to tell us more about other alternatives you
explored, art history. But what really just comes immediately to mind is the
question of imagery, a range of imagery, and how much, maybe at some point along
the way, how much time you think you really have and then choices have to be
made on that basis. All of us imagine that we're going to not last for ever,
but somehow it's indeterminate. And that's, of course, the great lie, but you
don't have to confront a finite amount of time.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Sure.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Right.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Am I moving in the right direction?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, I think you are. I think, though, that I really didn't
really have a clear indication of that until I did have this automobile accident.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Right. Then that was very clear.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Then it was very clear.

PAUL KARLSTROM: And this was just before you two met, so we're now. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right. I have to back up a little bit because part
of the thing that probably has some impact on the type of thing I do is the
fact that I do take injections, and at that time I was taking a lot of them.
Now I take three a day. And so my life is very, very organized or regulated.
And to some degree I think that's why I paint the kinds of things that I paint.
And also I think it's one reason why I can teach-and I really enjoy teaching
very, very much. And I think it can have less impact on the kind of energy that
I put in my painting than it might have for somebody else, because teaching
also involves a kind of regulated activity-or what would you call it?

PAUL KARLSTROM: It's a routine?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Routine. It's a routine, right. And yet, since my whole life
has been a routine, I have been able to separate that part from the other part
very, very well. And I've been able, I think quite successfully, to divorce
what I do in my studio from what I do at school. Even though they're connected,
I don't have the one being dependent upon the other. I can get away from it.
It's just like I don't have the dependency on insulin be part of my work, even
though I know it's connected, but it's not something which. . . . Well, I'm
not exactly sure what I'm saying, except that I feel oftentimes that people
who teach and paint at the same time or try to do art, really do get into difficulty
because they can't do either as well as they could if they did it separately.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And in my own case, I think, partially because of my diabetes,
that I'm able to really split them. And so I really have two lives.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Two or three?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: No, two. [laughs]

PAUL KARLSTROM: Because it occurred to me, of course, that. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Aesthetic, too.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, okay. In terms of work. In terms of your work, which
is then not to suggest that you don't have a. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And then I think. . . . But the other connection is that
because I do feel. . . . I don't feel handicapped. I feel limited in terms of
the amount of things that I can do. I have to eat breakfast, I have to eat lunch,
I have to eat dinner. I have to eat at a certain time. That in a sort of, almost
in a Freudian way, it makes me want to do really big things. I mean, I want
to do major things, and so I take on big. . . . Well, I paint large paintings.
I like doing things that require effort and require a kind of difficulty.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, you also take on big themes.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's true.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Big subjects.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's true. Actually, I mentioned that to my doctor once.
I said, "You know, I. . . ." It was a doctor that's now dead. His
name was Franz Kirschner, and he was also a painter and a wonderful, wonderful
man. We were talking. . . . Actually, I'd go visit him maybe every three months
or something. We'd just sit around and talk about his mother who lived in Switzerland
and I'd talk about my family and we'd talk about painting. We wouldn't talk
about diabetes and all. But it was very good. And I was feeling. . . . I'm like
virtually everybody else. I have my ups and my downs, more or less, and I was
feeling kind of down and I said, "It occurs to me that I probably paint
these superhuman figures because I'm such a poor physical specimen myself."
And he said, "Oh, shut up! That's stupid." And I said, "Well,
I thought it made a lot of sense." And he said, "It doesn't make any
sense at all," he says. And I think he's right. I think it wasn't. It doesn't
have anything to do with that. It's more a question of wanting to make paintings
which have a kind of assertive visual nature to them, and my way of doing that
is to find this Greco-Roman mythology of conflict and origin that allows me
to make paintings look the way I want the paintings to look. It's not so much
the story as it is how assertive the paintings look. And I suppose it could
be connected to some degree, but I think probably everybody feels relatively
inadequate in one way or another.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Everybody I know.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah, that's right.

PAUL KARLSTROM: And I don't want to know the ones that don't _____. [laughter]

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right. So I don't think that it's a Napoleonic complex.
Anyway, when my mother went to the sanitarium because she had her nervous breakdown,
she was ill not for too long but it was several months. That was when I actually
learned to sort of take care of myself. Before that time she had been very much
the person who basically took care of me. And she was quite wonderful. She instilled
in me a strong sense of being careful. I remember there was a young woman who
was in school with me in Banning-actually a pretty girl-who was pointed out
to me as also being diabetic, and she always ate ice cream for lunch. And I
was told never to eat anything that had any sugar in it at all. So she died.
And I don't exactly know why but it was impressed on my mind it was because
she ate the ice cream. [chuckles] She was probably just very ill or she certainly
had a worse case of it than I did, or a different kind of case. And they still
haven't been able to define it exactly; they have Type A and Type B and all
that sort of thing.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Mike doesn't belong to the modern youth in terms of the
medicine. We have a young friend who's about. . . . Well, he must be twenty-one
now. He learned he was diabetic when he was about twenty or nineteen. He has
a whole different set of vocabulary and ideas about testing and numbers and
works very actively, I guess, with his doctor in learning all this stuff.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I don't want to know anything about it.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Whereas Mike's idea is to deny it as much as possible, to
not think about it, to not know all this because you can't control it. I think
the way they teach people now, especially the young ones, is to give them as
much information and as much control as they can and make their lives as normal
as possible. But we always felt like if anybody knew you'd lose your job, you'd
lose your. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And that may still be true.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: It may be true. You might lose your job, or your insurance,
your car, your whatever. Nobody would give you any credit. You know, who knows?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I certainly would never want it to be known in relationship
to my art, because certainly when I was having that difficulty in Olympia, if
they knew I was Type A, they could have really attacked me. I mean, they were
attacking me for being a heavy drinker.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, how do you mean? How do you mean they could have?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: They could have said, "Well, he was a perfectly nice
fellow but obviously he had very low blood sugar when he was figuring out this.
. . ." [laughs] In other words, there's a diminished capacity aspect to.
. . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: I mean, there's so many questions that arise from what you're
telling me and I want to try to. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, yeah, I should get off of it.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, not necessarily. It's tempting then to sort of pursue
all these different directions and one of them. . . . And I'll indulge myself
because this takes out of the order of things and I find it very interesting.
I happen to believe that what people do is very much connected with their life
experience. That's my point of view and that doesn't mean it's right in your
case. But everything you've told me so far suggests to me that you do see a
real connection-not maybe direct and maybe not the way I would draw that connection-between
this experience, this recognition of your own limitations in a very real, physical
way and then the choices you made and ultimately the work. Now I don't want
to be simplistic about it, but one of the things that occurs to me-let's throw
this out and test it-is that you deal with themes that are-I was going to sort
of save this for some time later-but which are somewhat unusual in modern, sort
of contemporary art: classical mythology. And inherent in these themes, it seems
to me, are. . . . Well, they're big themes, they're big issues, and in a sense
they're universal, but one thing seems clear to me that these are powerful,
super beings, in a sense, that are us, but us exaggerated and powerful, and
that your own. . . . They can be used, I think, or have been used, to point
out our own helplessness and vulnerability. I don't want to push this or pursue
it, but it's just one of the things that occurs to me. And I guess what I want
to ask is have you ever thought in these terms in connection with your subjects:
That you have a relationship through your own health situation, your own life
experience with these powerful, powerful images and individuals?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, actually, I don't feel that there's a direct response,
but obviously there is. I mean, it's a question of, whether I think there is
or not, there is. But the reason I do the classical mythology is much more cerebral.
It's not a question of how I feel about things. It's how I think about things.
And I was a very good student in school-in grammar school and in high school.
(I went to high school in Riverside.) I like things intellectual and I like
verbal things and I was very interested in Latin, actually, in high school.
And I had a teacher named Margaret Finley, who was one of these maiden teachers
whose boyfriend died in the First World War and she never got married, all this
sort of thing. And she was a very strict taskmaster, and you had to pronounce
the words exactly right. Anyway just loved her. I think I took three years of
Latin, and at that time I think I got very, very involved in at least Roman
mythology, and through that I got involved in Greek Mythology, but the reason
I started using it in the paintings was because I wanted to make paintings that
had this kind of gestural, assertive quality to them that was prevalent in abstract
expressionism and the kind of painting that was being done when I was learning
painting. Now it can also be connected to the other thing, too, but I don't
feel like it's as direct a thing-because I could have chosen a whole lot of
different things. I could have painted cowboys, which actually I'd sort of like
to. Or I could have done other kinds of super heroes, like historical scenes
and battle scenes with Napoleon or something.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, after you watched the Olympics, you did do Mark Spitz.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right. [chuckles] That's right. Well, they were swimmers,
but it wasn't really Mark Spitz but it was the idea of this kind of achievement,
which was amazing.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And the divers. Yeah.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, I can see that. I mean, what I've seen of your work,
[how, although] these images, configurations, forms which you do, very interesting.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And there's a sense of them being very phallic, also, which
is something that I find really assertive. Well, I suppose it's just a kind
of assertive. . . . Well, go ahead, you can turn it over [the tape-Trans.].

[Session 1, Tape 2, side A]

PAUL KARLSTROM: A continuing interview with Michael Spafford and Liz Sandvig
on September 2, 1992. This is the first session, tape 2, side A, and Michael
was saying some interesting things. Of course then he waited until we turned
the tape recorder off to continue the idea, but I'd like to prompt you on this.
You were saying that one of your concerns is basically giving up. You can imagine,
you can conceive of a situation where you lose the impulse, the motivation,
to action. And it sounds to me perhaps as if this is something that is an important
factor in what makes you work and keep going.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: No, that's very true. And part of that's connected to my
condition as a diabetic. But because I've always thought or it's been a strong
feeling in the back of my mind that I'll get to a point where either I'll be
blind or I'll be mentally incapacitated or physically incapacitated so I can't
work. But I think being sensitive to that has made me sensitive to other statistical
information about people who are artists. I recall when I was a student in the
late fifties there was some kind of statistic about the number of people who
graduate as art students and how many of them continue to work say twenty years
after they've graduated as artists, and it was very, very tiny. It was something
like eight percent. Now, I think that's a big amount, but at that time I thought
that was really. . . . And I think probably what it meant was that people who
study art in college or in art school probably learn to be very good people
and then they go off and do things that interest them. They could do anything,
and it would still be a terrific education. But at that time I thought of it
as being sort of an indictment-or not an indictment. It was showing how difficult
it was to continue. It didn't have anything to do with talent. It didn't have
anything to do with opportunity. What it had to do with was just luck. And in
a way I still feel that way, and I feel very lucky that I'm still continuing.
I feel very lucky that I have a wife or a companion who is a really active maker
of art. I mean, neither one of us does it because we're, say, painting from
show to show. I'm not making paintings just so I can show them in a yearly faculty
exhibit. I do it because I really want to make it. Not make it. I really want
to make paintings, but I know that there are people who somehow are not able
to do this. I'm sure I've connected this, like I say, with the diabetes but
I'm still afraid. . . . Here I am fifty-six years old, and I'm still afraid
that I won't be able to do it again.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Let me ask you a question that then will move us right into
or back to the fact of your relationship. You mentioned you have a wife and
partner who is, it seems to me, tailor made to be supportive in some very important
ways, and presumably that's mutual and this is something that I hope we can
touch on as we talk about this. But it strikes me that your work is really.
. . . In fact the more I think about it, the more I notice that your work is
quite different and it seems that there are really very different impulses in
here [in the art?-Ed.]. And what I would like to do is sort of pursue this idea
of individuals, separate individuals, in the same field having met in art school
at Pomona continuing with, presumably, certain breaks and adjustments and so
forth and always a shifting relationship, which is the truth of anybody's relationship,
but to try to track that a little bit in part in terms of not the similarities
between you so much as maybe the differences.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Okay, I. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Whether it be style. . . . You see what I'm getting at?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Sure.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You know, how does this work? How did it work in your case?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, as I was explaining to you before-and I don't know
if it's on the tape or not-but when I was in high school I had a particular
interest in Latin and some of the verbal things. I was a very good speller,
and my math skills were adequate. But at the same time, I also enjoyed doing
things like cartooning-and this would be like sports cartooning-lettering-I
was an excellent letterer; I had the kind of control or facility-poster making,
commercial art. I was actually in high school when a man named James Smutz came
to our school for what they call Career Days. And he had a little advertising
agency in Riverside, California, called the Jim Smutz Advertising and Publicity
Agency, and he wanted to have somebody come after school and do layouts for
his ads. And so a number of us competed for that job and I actually got it.
So I worked for Jim for at least seven years off and on, and this is where I
really got my strong training in how to do art. I mean, I didn't have any classes
in how to do art at high school. I went on to college and learned to paint,
but I had already been formed sort of as a graphic-design artist. And what that
means, at that time anyway before they had xerography, we were using typing
paper most. . . . I mean, not typing paper. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Carbon.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . carbon paper and all that sort of thing. This was back
in the early fifties. At that time, the original art was generally done quite
large, and then it was reduced to work in whatever-either into magazines, where
it had very fine screened reproductions that would be like 120 dots to an inch,
or for newspapers where it was 60 dots to an inch. And so you always had to
think-or at least I was trained to think-in terms of making things very clear,
and this is particularly true in a value contrast way. And I remember I did
things-this is in addition to doing the layouts with pencil-I would do original
art where they would take it and they would translate it to a billboard size,
or I would do original art where they would take it and put it in a magazine,
or I'd do original art and they'd put it in a newspaper. But it was always done
with the idea that you could make it any size that you wanted and it would still
look good. It wasn't the actual piece so much as what the actual piece translated
to. And I had many wonderful experiences in the agency, and I not only did art
but I also wrote copy and I did some of the financial account work, which was
very, very interesting. I even did some selling, but I didn't like that. It's
very, very difficult. And I had a broad experience. But that was basically all
the art I did. I tried to do a little bit of painting, and I remember I had
one girlfriend who. . . . I met her because she was in a play. It was Anything
Goes. And actually, this was when I was in junior college, so I had already
graduated from high school and I went to junior college-Riverside Junior College-which
was on the same campus as the high school. And this girl played the lead in
Anything Goes by Cole Porter, and I thought it was just wonderful. I mean, I'm
sure she wasn't, but it was just great and her name was Evangeline Durr, "Vangie."
We used to. . . . I liked to drive a lot and I would just drive for hundreds
of miles, and everybody in Southern California was like that at a certain age.
And I'd go and I'd park at a drive-in eating place, and everybody'd come and
we'd talk about cars and things. And I had a '37 [Terra Plane, Terraplane],
which was an old Hudson and it was a wonderful car. And then I bought a '41
Mercury that was _____. You know, cars were a big part of my life. And I remember
driving with Vangie to the desert and back again. There were always other people
in the car.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh right, sure.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah, that's right. [laughs]

PAUL KARLSTROM: Do we believe that, Liz?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: [chuckles]

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I had absolutely no carnal experience with women at all.
I mean, it was just. . . . I guess I was just shy or something. Maybe that's
why she finally dropped me. The reason I mention her is because I remember meeting
her after we had broken up. I met her in a cafe in downtown Riverside, and she
asked me something about where I was going to go to school. And I said something
like, well, I didn't think I was going to go any further than the junior college
because basically I had a good job in the advertising agency and I could continue
the work there and I would make lots of money and everything would be fine.
And she got so angry with me. She said, "But you could be an artist."
And I thought, well, I wasn't really sure I could. But she was mad, and it got
me thinking in terms of the fact that, "Well, maybe I could do something
other than just be a commercial artist," because at that time, actually,
I think I had the sense that being a fine artist was much better than being
a commercial artist. I don't feel that way now. That was before Pop Art came
along and there was this whole range of people who sort of came from that field
and became very, very fine artists indeed. It had a lot to do with her attitude,
what I decided to do when I went to college, which was Pomona College. And so
I was thinking about not going to college even though I enjoyed the challenge
of going on to more school, but it was an expensive school. And when I got there
I decided I wanted to be. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: You met Peter Selz.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right. Peter Selz was there and it was his first year
also. Peter later became a curator at the Museum of Modern Art [New York? Los
Angeles?-Ed.] and he had written-or he was writing at that time, a book on German
expressionist paintings. And I remember he seemed very strange to me with his
accent, and he was very foreign. But I was very impressed by him, and I remember
that once I got to Pomona that they wouldn't give me any credit-or very little
credit-for any of the classes that I'd taken in my junior college. And I graduated
from the junior college second in my class. So I was the salutatorian and I
gave a speech and all that sort of thing. And I think that I felt fairly smug
about my level of achievement. When I got to Pomona, they said I had to take
all these classes over again. So it meant another four years after taking two
years of college. And so I remember telling Peter this and I said, "Boy,
I'm not going to do that. They can just go piss up a rope or something."
And Peter said, well, he wasn't sure he liked it there either but he'd agree
to stay a year if I would. [laughs] And of course all I had to be was there
a year and then of course I liked it and I wanted to go back. So he was big
influence on me getting more of an education. But I think this is sort of what
I mean by what I said earlier that I feel two things are going on. I feel like
there's a lot of luck involved in how my career, or my direction, my life choices
came about. I think I could have easily stayed in Riverside, California, for
the rest of my life, joined the Junior Chamber of Commerce and the Toastmasters
and done all the same sort of things that my boss did. I could have gone on.
. . . Well, actually, I had done a cartoon for the Los Angeles Examiner. I don't
think there is a Los Angeles Examiner anymore, but there used to be two big
newspapers.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Right. It was only a few years ago that the Hearst paper closed
down.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Is that what it was? Well, anyway, they had a cartoon contest
for sports cartoons, and I guess I was in high school at that time-I'm pretty
sure I was in high school-and I was one of the finalists, and the prize was
a full tuition in Art Center School. Art Center is a big commercial art school.
At that time-it's quite different from the way it is now-it was just commercial
art at that time.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I wanted to go there by the way, so this is a shared experience.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Okay, but that was way back when they just got started back
in the early fifties. I don't know when you were interested, but had they moved
to where they are now when you were. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh, this was the late. . . . Well, I graduated in '59. This
isn't about me but that puts it in time. So it was about '59, '60.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: You graduated from high school in '59?

PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Okay, so we graduated from college in '59.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh, who's counting? [all chuckle]

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Of course, that was six years after I graduated from high
school. But anyway I've told people that I actually got a scholarship and then
I turned it down and went to Pomona. I didn't actually get it. But the possibility
was there, because I was one of the four finalists to do the final cartoon.
As a matter of fact, this is kind of interesting, because I remember the final
cartoon. It was the result of a football game, and they gave you the game that
you were going to work on just a couple of days before they had to have the
cartoon. And the game was a game between. . . . It was either SC [USC?-Ed.]
and Berkeley or SC and UCLA or something like that. And I remember that my caption
was "Et tu, Bruin."

PAUL KARLSTROM: UCLA, right?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: [laughs]

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And I don't recall exactly what I drew, but it must have
had something to do with somebody, a Trojan and a Bear, and. . . . In other
words, even then I was sort involved with the Latin kind of classical referencing,
even before I decided to become a painter. Anyway, it didn't win. But one of
the things that we got to do as finalists, we got to go visit the studio of
the guy that drew Steve Canyon. Was is Milton Caniff? Or somebody like that.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Yes!

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And it was quite wonderful because. . . . And when I saw
this guy with his original cartoons all over the wall, and he was there and
he had his slanted table and he had his light and he had his stereo-or whatever
it was at that time-and I thought, "My God! Nothing could be greater than
that!" And the fact that everybody looked at his work and enjoyed it. So
I really wanted to be a cartoonist. I really wanted to be somebody who had that
kind of impact on people. And also I think I recognized that this man, even
though he had this tremendous impact, was relatively anonymous as a person.
You know, people knew who he was, but he wasn't. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: A movie star. I mean he wasn't a personality out there.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah, that's right. And unfortunately at that time-or I thought
it unfortunately-most of the fine artists were involved in the cult of the personality
and it was the artists themselves that was important; the work was relatively
unimportant.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So you knew, presumably then, about the abstract expressionists?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Oh sure.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Pollock and all. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Sure.

PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . deKooning and these people. They were. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Sure, that's right.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And you didn't feel you could live up to all that.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I didn't want to. Yeah, I didn't like that.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So getting then to Pomona, something happened that then diverted
you a bit on to this course that finally has led to now and what you're doing.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I continued working for the advertising agency even though
I was going to Pomona. I would drive back to Riverside on weekends and work
all night, actually, just getting things done. And it was very nice because
I got paid. The thing that happened at Pomona was I met some people who had
such an impact on my life that I really couldn't change after that. And part
of them were the students, but most of them were the teachers, and one of them
was a woman named Teresa Fulton. She was just wonderful. She's dead now, but
she was an art historian. Her husband. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Joe.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . Joe Fulton actually was the head curator at the Pasadena
Art Museum and had had some difficulty with the board and there was a big dust
up and. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I think he was an alcoholic.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Was he an alcoholic? Well, at any rate, they had gotten a
divorce, but Teresa was just the most brilliant person that I had ever come
into contact with. I took a course on early Netherlandish painting with her,
and I think you [ELIZABETH SANDVIG-Ed.] were in the same course. Or maybe it
was a different. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I know I took it, but I don't remember that. . . . I don't
think you were in my class.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, at any rate, when I took it that was. . . . The early
Netherlandish painting is people like Jan van Eyck, and Petrus Christus, and
Roger van der Weyden and those, you know, what they call Flemish primitives.
And it was incredible how interesting she made it, and she was always so well
prepared. And I found out later that she just worked her butt off to do this.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Went to the library. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I mean, every time she had a class, she spent hours ahead
of time getting everything together. And I didn't realize. I thought it just
came right off the top of her head.

PAUL KARLSTROM: One wishes. [chuckles]

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah. And all of us who studied with her, she gave us a sort
of entree to meet other people who were interesting. We met a woman named Kate
Steinitz who. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh, I knew Kate.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah, and she was at the. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: We went to her apartment.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: It was quite wonderful because here she had been. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Kurt Schwitters.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . a friend of Kurt Schwitters and she had been an artist
herself and now she was in charge of the Elmer Belt Library. As a matter of
fact later when we were in Rome she came to visit us and it was one of the most
interesting experiences that we've ever had. She was quite elderly at that time,
and she wanted us to get shards of pottery from some hill for her, and she'd
sit in our little apartment and she'd start talking and she would just fall
asleep in the middle of a sentence and then she'd wake up and she'd be speaking
a totally different language but the same thought-she'd be speaking French or
German-and it was just incredible. I mean she was so. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: The Watts. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Then she got involved in saving the Watts Tower. So that
was how. . . . She and Teresa. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Right.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Teresa was very involved.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And all the students also got involved in this. And it wasn't
a social issue so much as it was just an art issue. And I think that was one
of the first times that I became aware of the fact that something that was nonpractical
was important.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You two knew one another at this time? You weren't married
yet?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Right.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right. I don't even think we were dating.

PAUL KARLSTROM: But you were going to some of the same things?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: We were in the same classes.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay, in the same classes, but the visiting of Kate Steinitz
was. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: But I always think of you as being ahead of me somehow.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, I was a year ahead of you but I only graduated a half
a year ahead of you.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Right. But Pomona was very strict about requirements. So
like my first year was full up with all these requirements and you weren't in
any classes.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right. But I came to school before you.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I know, but by the second year that I was there I was taking
some of those classes that you had already taken. Even the art classes; we never
took art classes together.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: It's possible.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: But I was certainly aware of him as being. . . . He was
the most skilled of anybody. I mean. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Ohhh. In a literally accurate way. In other words, I could
draw perspective. . . . I used to do elevations for housing developments. And
I could do portraits and. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And he could draw the model-in any position. And all the
proportions were right. And there wasn't anybody that could do that. And actually
I realize now the faculty couldn't do that either.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Was Millard Sheets teaching there at the time?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Oh, that's who I went to study with.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah, he was at Scripps College, and yes.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I know, but nowadays they [the students-Ed.] seem to be able
to cross register.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, at that time, they were very segregated.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I see.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: You could take classes, though. And I went up there to.
. . . By that time I must have been a junior. When I went up to see him, what
I saw was that he was doing these murals and things, but the students were doing
them and then he signed his name to it. And then when I saw them, by that time.
. . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Way ahead of his time. [laughs]

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: . . . my taste was already different. Actually in those
two years I didn't like his work anymore. It was all these, those very stylized
gold angels and figures and. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: And the whole savings and loan. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Oh, gosh, yes. Meanwhile, we also had the man who did the
horse, the flying horse for the gasoline. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: For Mobil Oil.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: . . . Mobil Oil, was there.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Really.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I forget his name [________-Ed.]. He was a sculpture teacher
at Scripps.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I remember it was very shocking to me that he did a bench
and they embedded this medallion of the flying horse, of Pegasus.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: It's still there.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And somebody, though, painted it red, painted the bronze
red. [I think, It was my first] idea of vandalism with a point.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Right. [chuckling]

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: But when I had been studying, I was already. . . . I started
so differently. Like the first painting that ever had any impact on me was the
Paul Klee in the Phillips Collection of the. . . . What's it called? Safari
Song or Desert Song? Arab Song.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I don't remember but, yeah.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And, see, the first thing that I thought was wonderful was
a Pogo cartoon. [laughs]

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: It's so odd!

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, it seems you agree that you come from somewhat different
positions on this, and what I would like to do when we put a new one [tape-Ed.]
in here is to try to then track that initial collision, because you're both
interested in art to one degree or another but maybe slightly different views
of where that might lead. But you came into conjunction and there's clearly
a story there, which we can. . . .

[Session 1, Tape 2, side B ]

PAUL KARLSTROM: A continuing interview with Spafford/Sandvig. This is on September
2, 1992. Tape 2, side B, and we still have you stuck at Pomona-changing perhaps.
Both of you a little bit are evolving and getting to know one another better.
And perhaps the both of you can give an account of how things proceeded and
how ultimately you ended up here in Seattle but with the many steps along the
way, and just how that came about. And particularly in terms of your growth
as a couple-evolution as a couple-and as artists.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Now, what I'm going to try to do, Elizabeth, is to quickly.
. . . I'm going to regress a little bit and then I'm going to synopsize until
we get to Seattle and then if you want to come in and. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: . . . .disagree.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . revise it. . . . [laughter]

PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay, that sounds fair.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I had been at Pomona for a year, and I was in my second year
when I had an automobile accident. I can recall very clearly that it was on
Foothill Boulevard and I was driving a '49 Ford two-door which I had just gotten
the driver's side door fixed. It was a door that had a tendency to open up when
you were driving. Of course they didn't have any seat belts at that time. I
had a friend in the car with me and it must have been after midnight. We were
on our way to a place called Stinky's to get. . . . I was going to get a cup
of coffee and he was going to get a beer and we were studying for tests. And
I recall my test was going to be in sociology. And by that time, I had gotten
to the point where I was sort of on track to be a very good student at Pomona
and I eventually became Phi Beta Kappa. But I wasn't thinking of that so much
at the time, but I was very, very conscious of making a good effort as a student.
The accident occurred because a car that was making a left turn actually got
headed in our lane. Foothill Boulevard was a highway that had no divider and
it had very sharp shoulders that dropped off the side. The car that was making
a left turn looking for a motel, I believe, was coming right toward me. And
I don't think I was going very fast, but this car was coming right at us and
I recall being very conscious of the fact that head-on collisions were generally
fatal so I put on my brakes and we skidded broadside into the oncoming car.
He happened to hit at the door that I had just gotten fixed, and both of us
that were in the car bounced around and the car turned over several times. I
don't think I ever lost consciousness, but what happened was that the person
that was in the car with me was just knocked out the other door and he hurt
his finger. I stayed in the car while it was rolling over, went over the edge
of the road, and I was eventually thrown out of the car and wedged between two
rocks and the car fell on me. So I was quite badly injured and I don't want
to talk about all aspects of it because. . . . Actually there were some really
funny things that happened. But at any rate I was out for like a semester. And
the thing that I remember primarily about this were two things: I was angry
because I had missed my exam and I was afraid that I wouldn't graduate. Or not
graduate, but I wouldn't pass the course. I was upset because my car was damaged.
And then later on I was upset because I realized that would have a negative
impact on my diabetic condition. I was in the hospital for maybe two or three
weeks. Then I had to go home and recover. And I missed school. With the insurance
money that was paid eventually. . . . The person that hit me was not insured,
was not licensed. He actually was an itinerant crop picker who I've never met
but I feel very sorry for because he had borrowed the car and he had a pregnant
wife in the car with him and all this sort of thing, but. . . . And I don't
know what they did. They probably garnisheed his wages or something. But my
insurance paid enough money so that when I did eventually go back to school
I was driving a '52 MG TD. [laughs]

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And there you have it.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And that's one of the things that attracted Elizabeth to
me.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Of course. Now, I didn't know how to drive. You have to
remember that I'd been living in Mexico and we didn't have a car. We took cabs
or [paseros, pesados] or the bus. And so Mike said he would teach me how to
drive.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: [laughs]

PAUL KARLSTROM: What a line.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Our relationship almost was ruined at that very point.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Anyway, so he tried to teach me how to drive, and he took
me to Disneyland. And then he tried to help me every time that. . . . It wasn't
anything to do with painting. It was usually writing. You had to write, it seemed
to me, all the time at Pomona. I mean, every single week somebody wanted another
paper. So Mike would help me checking over, and also he could do this thing
that was so marvelous that I had never learned to do very well and that was
type. Because I was brought up by a working mother, I did kind of learn that,
if you learned how to do something, that was what people expected you to do.
So that if you learned how to type, you might end up becoming a typist. I was
very careful. I've been extremely selfish most of my life by not learning how
to do a lot of things that other people know how to do. So I didn't know how
to drive, but I would have liked to learn, I guess, so. . . . And then I didn't
know how to type, and so Mike would type my papers for me. And what else did
I not know how to do?

PAUL KARLSTROM: I thought you said you weren't interested romantically.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah, that's true.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, it sounds like doing a lot of work for her.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, but she's sort of squeezing this together.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh, okay.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yeah, so anyway. Anyway, we had a good time because he was
smart. We went around for at least two years or _____ to me.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: We had a long courtship.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I was not. . . . I was much more experienced than Mike,
and I think that was why I was interested in him. I'd already known a lot of
boys in Mexico and I already knew what I didn't want. And most of them were
what I didn't want. Especially being in Mexico, they had a very narrow view
of what women did or the kind of life they lead and how supervised they were.
And I could see I wasn't going to fit into that kind of life at all, so. . .
. So off we. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Anyway, we got married in 1959, and my art teacher, painting
teacher, Jim Grant, gave us away-or gave me away. We got married in his garden.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I'm going to regress back again.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: You are? Why?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Because I haven't quite got to the point that I wanted to
get to.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Oh, gosh.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I had just gotten to getting the MG. Then I came back to
college, and that was when I first saw Elizabeth was when she was sort of in
my space, or what I thought was in my space in the art school. At the same time,
even though I was interested in painting, I knew that I wasn't as skilled-or
maybe not skilled, but I didn't have as clear a view of what art was as some
of the other students in the program. My idea of art was basically illustration.
And so I had quite a bit of difficulty with the teachers, not that I wasn't
teachable but I can recall writing a paper for a sculpture teacher by the name
of Charles Lawler, who was quite a wonderful teacher, I think, and he did work
that was similar to Brancusi's. He was that type of formalist. And I wrote a
paper about Wilhelm Lehmbruck-an artist, a sculptor named Lehmbruck. And he
thought the paper was wonderful. He had everybody in the class-it was a sculpture
class-write a paper about an artist. And the way he expressed that to the whole
class, while I was sitting there, was he said. . . . I don't know how he referred
to me but something like, "Mr. Spafford, this is a wonderful paper that
you've written about Lehmbruck. Perhaps you should be an art historian rather
than an artist." So it was sort of a backhanded compliment. And as I think
about it, I think most of my career choices and my choices for directions that
I've taken in my life have been pretty determined by a kind of perversity. I
have a tendency to do-just like everybody else-the opposite from what I'm told
I should do. And it was not only his commentary that kept me interested in being
an artist, but it was a monograph written by a man named Morley, who'd written
a book on. . . . He taught at Princeton, I believe, and he wrote a book on medieval
art history. I can't remember what it was called. But he also wrote a monograph
explaining that it was not possible to be both an art historian and an artist
at the same time. That one discipline involved a kind of rational, fact finding,
the other needed a kind of intuitive process, and that they were mutually exclusive.
And so just because he said it couldn't be done, I thought that that's what
I would like to do. I had a number of different opportunities for going on to
graduate school. I was a very good student at Pomona. I guess, I graduated magna
cum laude.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: You were going to apply for a Rhodes.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Right. I was going to apply for a Rhodes scholarship because
my profile fit fairly well and I was told that I'd have a fairly good chance.
I was a former tennis player and I still played some tennis. I had the diabetes,
which in a sense it was a plus because it showed that I could overcome adversity.
I had exhibited a kind of academic intelligence, which was the sort of thing
they were looking for. And I had this hobby, which would be painting. [laughs]
And the other thing that was sort of a drawback was that they didn't have any
courses in art history at Oxford-that was all done through the Slade School,
which I guess was their art school-so I would have had to, say, go in comparative
literature or something like that which was all right. I didn't mind. Or even
philosophy. But by that time I had decided that I'd rather be married, and it
was not possible to be married and to have a Rhodes scholarship.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: You had to be single.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: You had to be single, right. So when I was in the process
of actually being promoted for this thing, and I told them that I didn't want
to do it. But I did apply for. . . . What was it called? A Woodrow Wilson. .
. .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yeah.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . Scholarship. And I remember going down and being interviewed,
and you actually went with me.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yeah.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I did very poorly in the interview and I didn't get that
either. But, through Teresa Fulton, I applied to three graduate schools in art
history. And I decided that it would be best to get a Ph.D. in art history and
then to continue being an artist, just to show that I could do that.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And also, you thought it would be easier to teach art history.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right. I thought it would be easier. Fewer hours.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: [laughs]

PAUL KARLSTROM: Uh huh. [said sardonically!-Trans.]

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And some people, like the artists kept saying, "You
can't do that."

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And I said, "Well, you can't do it but I can."

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: So off we went to Harvard.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, actually I applied to three schools. I applied to NYU,
to Harvard, and to Yale.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I don't remember.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And I was accepted at all three. I got no money offered from
Yale, I got two thousand dollars offered at Harvard, and I got some money from
NYU. And in retrospect, I think I should have gone to NYU, because it would
have been more the kind of program that I would have found challenging.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Also you would have been positioned better as an artist.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, that's true. But anyway so I went to Harvard to study
with a man named Seymour Slive, who was a Rembrandt expert, and he was a friend
of Teresa's and she had recommended me very highly so. . . . Unfortunately,
when I got there-this was in 1960-he had just gone off to Holland for a year,
so I never studied with him. And the courses I did take at Harvard-with perhaps
the exception of a course from. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Rosenberg.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . Jacob Rosenberg-were laughable. I was so used to a
really excellent, very challenging kind of education at Pomona that I was really
disappointed by the kind of education that was offered at Harvard. Now, I know
that a lot of that had to do with my own fault. That I just didn't put myself
in the position to be challenged, because I was interested in continuing to
paint and I did paint quite a bit during that year. I had an exhibit in the
Fogg Museum along with other first-year graduate students. And a lot of first
year graduate students had been painters. And I think there were nine or ten
of us, or seven or eight of us in that program. Anyway, after a year there I
decided that that wasn't for me.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, you'd better explain what happened. Really why you
decided. Or what brought it to a head. He went to a party.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: We were invited to a party in New York City. At that time,
Peter Selz was the curator at the Museum of Modern Art. He lived on Central
Park West and he was still married to his first wife, Thalia Selz. We were going
down to New York and I guess we got in touch with him, and he said, "Well,
come to this cocktail party." Or I guess it was just a party that he was
having or a dinner or something.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Something.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Peter loves to give parties.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah, right. And so we went up and Mark Rothko was there.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Whoa.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . and a man named Bates Lowry. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: He was an art historian.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . and some other people.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: A whole lot of people.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And at any rate, I was introduced to both Bates and Mark
as somebody who was taking art history at Harvard and who wanted to teach, or
something like that. And I remember Rothko. . . . I remember this very clearly.
He laughed and I remember him as being a very ebullient person. I mean, he was
drinking very heavily at that time and so he was obviously. . . . He wasn't
drunk, but he was very high. And he laughed a lot, and he said he just loved
to teach. And I was surprised and I said, "Well, Mr. . . ." Of course,
I was twenty-four years old or something, and I said. . . . Guess I was twenty-five
. . . or twenty-four. He was a god to me, and I said, "Do you really like
to teach?" And he said, "Yes. Think of all the talent you can squelch."

PAUL KARLSTROM: [laughs]

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And I'm sure that's exactly the kind of answer that I would
give now, but at the time it came as a great shock to me. Anyway, he and Bates
Lowry were. . . . And if you're a personal friend of Bates, I'm really sorry
but he. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: No, no, I'm not. I'm an objective observer.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: They were arguing, and the upshot was that Bates was writing
an article about one of Rothko's pieces for the [College Art Journal, College
Art journal]. And Rothko was saying, "But you haven't even seen the painting."
And Bates was saying things like, "Well, but I've seen a lot of your work.
I'm very familiar with your work." And Rothko was saying, "But you
should see the painting." And he said, "Well, I've got this photograph
of it." And he had a little black-and-white photograph of the painting.
And Rothko got increasingly more angry. At first I thought he was sort of kidding,
but then I realized he was really quite hurt. And Bates was being. . . . Obviously,
he hadn't drunk as much or he just could hold his liquor better or something
but he was being much more precise and cold about his position. So it was sort
of very yin-yang type of thing. And finally Bates said that. . . . He said something
that struck me. . . . I mean, it struck me as being sort of true. He said, "The
people who read my article are going to see this photograph. They're not going
to see your painting." And I realized that was true and it was a thing
that an art historian could say, or at least a person who was writing an article
could say, but it was very wrong also in a broader sense. And I identified myself
with turning into somebody like Bates Lowry and I really didn't want to. So
I think it was from that. I had been thinking about it previous to that time,
but I think that was the time that really set in my mind that I didn't want
to continue in that particular field. I think I realized that probably this
person was right that wrote the monograph that if I wanted to be a painter I
just had to do that. I had no idea of how I would do it. I had no way to make
any money. I think that at that time, though, that we had lots of friends who
were poets and things and they did things like they drove trucks or they parked
cars or they. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Heaven knows what they did.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: You know, they did very menial labor as a way of doing their
art, and I assumed that that's the sort of thing I would do too. But. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: We went to Mexico.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, the thing is I got a degree without knowing it.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: See, I'd been there a year. I'd taken a German test, which
I just sort of guessed at and passed, I guess. And the Latin that I had took
the place of the French that they wanted me to take. I just took courses. I
didn't write any thesis or anything. I left. They mailed the degree to my mother-an
M.A. to my mother!-and I didn't' even know about it until much later. So that's
how I have my advanced degree. [laughs] It's probably why I have my job at the
University of Washington, but it wasn't. . . . It was sort of a consolation
degree. It wasn't something that you got on the way to a Ph.D.

PAUL KARLSTROM: It's a terminal. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: It was something that you were given as a consolation if
you weren't able to finish.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, I think the term is the "Terminal M.A."

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Is it? Well, whatever. It was nothing. It was just a year
of very mediocre classroom stuff.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, what were you doing, Liz, at the same time? You were
studying. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Paul, I was in another place. We were living in the same
apartment, and supposedly I was in the education department, which was so different.
I had a class from. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Kepple. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: . . . Francis Kepple, and what he was doing was motivating
everybody to canvass for Kennedy. And I remember I wanted to take a class at
the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and whoever my advisor was says it wasn't taking
advantage of being at Harvard, so that was out. So they allowed you to take
exams in education subjects and waive those topics. So then I took reading courses.
Harvard wouldn't let you. . . . I mean, the art history department would not
let you take graduate courses in art history if you were in another department.
So they let me do private, arranged courses.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Like with Havrecamp Begeman.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh, really.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I did a class with Havrecamp Begeman, and that was wonderful.
Or I took a course in architecture. I don't know, I just sort of hopped around
and took. . . . I had a class that. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: With Naum Gabo was it?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: . . . with Gabo, and, you know, a lot about Moholy-Nagy
and things like that. [laughs] And then I had to do other things like practice
teaching, which I just hated because they had one art teacher for seven hundred
students. It was in the suburbs in Weston and she taught three days in the high
school and two days in the junior high. And I couldn't remember all these. .
. . When you had all these children-you had thirty in a class-I couldn't remember
their names, I couldn't distinguish between them. And it was very rigid. You
had ten minutes to lay out materials, ten minutes to work, and ten minutes to
clean up. And for that kind of an art class, I thought it was better to have
none. So we went to Mexico for the summer to sort of decide what to do. And
we stayed with my mother. By this time she'd moved to an apartment right downtown
at the corner of [Mondres] and [Anjuhentes], which is like in the middle of
the city. And I sold paintings. I was allowed to be a guest artist in the [Parke
de Sullivan] and join the Artists' Union and sell paintings on Sundays to tourists,
very inexpensively, but it brought in a little money. And then Mike got an under-the-table
job teaching at Mexico City College. [phone rings; MICHAEL SPAFFORD apparently
goes off to answer-Trans.] And I know we took a trip. Then we took a trip to.
. . . Well, we were there for three years. At some point, my mother needed eye
surgery, and we took a trip to Washington, and I found a little gallery there
to sell my work. Very nice French woman. Oh, I know. Somebody came from the
University of Arizona to this park and they. . . . [laughs] His name was Bill
Steadman, and he was director of the gallery at the University of Arizona, and
he wanted to arrange a show of Diego Rivera. So I took him home with me and
introduced him to my mother, who then tried to call and make arrangements for
him to meet people that could help him. Well, he couldn't get anywhere. So I
ended up having a show there. That was very nice. And all I did was mail off
the [Mong, Hmong] prints, and then they framed them and set them up and then
when we were driving. . . . We drove up there and stopped and then drove on
to Washington. So at some point along there, I guess I became pregnant so that
by the time we came back to Mexico, we stayed until our son was born. By this
time, we had realized we didn't want to lead an expatriate life. I had a lot
of friends that I went to high school with of all kinds of nationalities that
spoke like five languages. And if you weren't Mexican, you really had to be
able to do something, some skill that the Mexicans couldn't do themselves. And
there really weren't. . . . Because they were very strict about the immigration
and things that were available. And so we realized we couldn't stay there, make
paintings. I mean, it was full of people from other countries who would come
and stay six months or three months and then drive to the United States and
hit these-I don't even know what to call them-these shows like in Florida and
places like that.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Art shows?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Art shows. But they were painting tourist paintings, and
so certainly we realized we couldn't do that. And obviously in having a child.
. . . We had friends there who were artists who prayed for money, but we couldn't
live like that either. We were much too conventional. So Mike started to apply
for jobs. And a lot of them wanted him to come and be an art
historian. One of them was actually the University of Arizona, but they wanted
him to come and. . . . It involved a lot of flying, taking trips. And we thought
with his health it was too risky. So we chose what we thought was the best place
to leave from. You know, like we didn't really want to be in California at the
present time, but we thought we might in the future. But once we got here. .
. .

PAUL KARLSTROM: To Seattle.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: To Seattle, we stayed here two years in a house-rented a
house-and then we began. . . . Oh, let's see, I think we went and spent the
summer in Mexico, and then we came back and bought a house. It's [the tape recorder-Ed.]
just starting to flash.

PAUL KARLSTROM: That's all right.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: So, now that doesn't say anything about art. It gives no
idea of the kind. . . .

[Session 1, Tape 3, side A ]

PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay, this is a continuing interview with Spafford/Sandvig.
We'll do a little bit more perhaps, if that's okay.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Sure.

PAUL KARLSTROM: And this is session one on September 2, 1992. This is the third
tape, side A. And Liz, you. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I was talking about going to Mexico after leaving Harvard.
The three years that we spent there were great working years. I guess, for one
thing I had a room to work in, and I spent most of those three years, I suppose,
doing monoprints or monotypes. And I didn't really get into painting. Maybe
I did a few little paintings, but. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: But did you say you were selling some, that you were actually
making a little income?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes. These were all monoprints, though. And they were not
done with a press. I painted on the piece of glass, I put the paper down on
the glass, and I drew on the back. And then I kept repeating the process, building
it up. So in a way it's sort of like transfer paintings but with a slight linear
aspect. The kind of subject matter that I was interested in were some Greek
myths, but quite different from Mike. Things like Harpies and. . . . What else?
I can't remember very well.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Her work was seen in this park by a man named Steadman.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Did I tell about that?

PAUL KARLSTROM: You mentioned that and ended up with a show as a result.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: At the University of Arizona in Tucson.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And I had a show at the. . . . I had three shows. The first
show was at the Galeria Genova and it was all watercolors, all totally abstract.
Just shapes. And I remember Alma Reed came. Do you remember Alma Reed?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Um hmm.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And it was very exciting and I didn't sell a thing. And
there was another gallery. You remember Antonio Sousa?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Um hmm.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: They were going to give me a show, but I had to do work
that was like work that I had done much earlier and that I wasn't interested
in doing.

PAUL KARLSTROM: What was that like?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: That was work that I did when I was at Harvard. Actually,
it was little tiny paintings about eight-by-ten inches, because the space that
I had to work at was a hallway with a desk in it. And it was three-feet square.
And so I worked very tiny and I just adjusted to that.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: What were they of?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: They were very abstract sort of little plant forms. More
like Paul Klee than anything else, I think than any other time. Watercolors.
So then in Mexico City I was doing these monoprints, and I was doing animals,
and one of the reasons I was doing these animals was because in Mexico animals
were not considered appropriate subject matter. Partly it may be cultural that
there isn't very much respect for animals, but also it's just they had all these
rigid views-of art had to have content-political content-or it had to. . . .
There were so many things about the way it should be, and so I always went the
other way so if they said. . . . Mine was very pale and soft as opposed to everything
being very strong with big thick lines around it. But meanwhile we went around
and looked at it all. And I mean certainly I loved Diego Rivera's murals in
[Chapingo, Japingo] and Remedios's. Well, Remedios Varo was one of my favorite
painters and she was a very tight. . . . What would you call it?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Surrealist.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Surrealist painter who. . . . But her paintings are funny.
People riding bicycles through narrow streets but a man with a long red beard
and it's his beard that becomes the bicycle handlebars. And she painted about
twenty paintings, but she died fairly young-I think in her forties-and so. .
. . She's one of the women that's included along with Leonora Carrington and
Frieda Kahlo. And I always liked Frieda's paintings but. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, I was going to ask you.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Frieda was still alive when I was going to school, and nobody
ever thought of her as a painter. She was a political person. She was a star
and she demanded this incredible amount of attention.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, what about the idea of roles, if I may ask that? By this
time you two were married.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: We had no. . . . When I think about it, we were totally
unrealistic. I had the idea that he could work for five years and then I would
work for five years. And then this would provide enough money. It was just totally
unrealistic, because you couldn't do that.

PAUL KARLSTROM: But did you see yourselves-if it's possible to think back to
that time-both as artists and coeval, in a sense, that you both had your art
and that you needed to find a way, each of you, to pursue these careers? Or
sometimes did you have perhaps a more traditional idea of roles and responsibilities
for income and work? Or is this something you really didn't think about?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I can honestly say I didn't think about it. I mean, I realize
I probably never thought about it very much. I think I was not very well trained
in thinking about money or managing it or. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Did you see your art as equally important? I guess that's the
most direct way to put it.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I'd say no. And that was partly from my experience at Pomona.
There was more of an attitude where the men were going to go out and get a job
and earn money and become artists and the women were going to become teachers
or homemakers. And it spread through everything. Everything from. . . . I always
had the feeling nobody ever told you the truth about what they thought about
what you did. Now I realize it wasn't that they didn't tell you the truth, it
was that they didn't know-anymore than one knows now. That it's more to do.
. . . Unless you have an absolutely stellar talent and are so brilliant that
you're just surpassing everybody else, then you're just, you're one of a huge
number of people that make art for pleasure. So of those people that are going
to go on and continue either to enjoy it or to be productive or to be creative
or to be inventive, there's no way of telling who those people are going to
be. So that no adult is ever going to deliberately discourage a young person
and say, "I don't think you should do this." Although every once in
a while somebody tells me about people that have done that, told them, "No,
you don't have enough talent or you. . . ."

PAUL KARLSTROM: These are artists then?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Uh huh. And I think that's terrible because, I don't think
there's any way of being quite so clear about it. I mean, there's certain basic-or
at least it used to be-there were certain basic skills that you had to know.
But even now, some of the people who are most skilled end up being the worst
artists. So therefore you can't use that as a guideline. You can't say that
if you can copy this bust in fifteen minutes, and make it look just like the
way it looks given the sixteenth-century viewpoint that you're going to be any
more successful than anybody else. So nobody said, "Elizabeth, you've got
to learn to letter," or "You have to learn to do this or do that."
It might have been more useful if they had, I suppose, although I hated it when
people did try and teach me that sort of thing. And Mike said I was an unteachable.
That is that whatever everybody said it just sort of went right through me and
I didn't pay much attention. Maybe I've always been that way.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Which I meant as a compliment. I don't think we. . . . At
that time, we weren't thinking in the same terms that we think now, but I realize
now that there is a fundamental difference between the way Elizabeth is an artist
and the way that I am an artist. And the way I like to explain it is that basically
my intelligence as an artist is reactive. I react to things either that have
gone before or to ideas that. . . . Like I did a piece for the [Seattle-Ed.]
Opera House called Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, which is based upon
a Wallace Stevens poem. I happen to think the poem is just absolutely beautiful.
And I've done it three times and I'll probably do it again. But it's in reaction
to something else. Elizabeth, on the other hand, her artistic intelligence is
basically creative. It's not reactive. And she actually comes up with solutions
that even she doesn't know where they come from. They just sort of pop out.
Now, it's not that she's not reacting to things that she has experiences with,
because she does, but she doesn't do it in the same sort of way that I do. I
basically had one idea in 1958 and I've been reacting to that same idea ever
since. Elizabeth, through her career, has gone from being an abstract painter
to being almost a naturalist painter. She's done landscapes, she's done polyester
resin sculpture. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: That's true.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . she's done proposals for major sculptural projects,
she's done installation pieces. In the last ten years, she's been primarily
a painter.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: But that's because I just made that decision. I decided,
"Well, I might live another twenty years for sure and I better stick to
one thing." That I had to settle down. And that as far as the sculpture
went I didn't have the physical capacity to keep developing by myself, that
if I did sculpture, I was going to be dependent on other people. And I wasn't
brought up that way. You know, I wasn't. . . . I'm not a team player. I'm an
individual.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: But at the same time, another reason for selecting the painting
is that you could see by what was happening to our two careers that I was having
more success than you were-in a career sense.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes, right.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And part of that was because I kept doing the same basic
thing. It's not that the work didn't change, but it was like variations on the
same approach. And it's a very. . . . At least it's described as a very Eurocentric
male point of view. You know, you become like [Giorgio-Ed.] Morandi and do your
bottles just in infinite varieties.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: That's true. You get better at it. And also, there was another
little thing that came in there. And that was between the time when my child
was born and he was six years old we went to Italy. So for two years when he
was three, from the time he was three, I had a studio and I worked on the polyester
resin sculpture, which were techniques that I'd learned in college, partly from
Jack Zajac, who taught sculpture, and partly from Jim Grant, who then went on
and became. . . . He was a painter, but then he went on and became a sculptor
using polyester resin and did big pieces. Well, the bigger these pieces. . .
. When I was in Italy, everything had to be done by hand-I didn't have any tools-and
it was obsessively slow and I also found I didn't have the California interest
in finish. You know, the idea of perfection. And there were a lot of other people
that had that, and they could do it much better. And mine were always sort of
a little funky and a little odd. So then I began making things out of screen
and mesh, and I did that for at least ten years or longer. And when I went from
making three-dimensional things into like one-dimensional pieces that hung on
the wall, I then went to Bellevue Community College and learned how to weld
so I could make the structures to hold this transparent. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, ____.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And then I hung it with transparent net, which I wrote on
or drew on with silicone sealer. And then this became. . . . It's like a very
fragile temporary art. And I think I felt like at the time I was expressing
some kind of vulnerability and I was making all these things which if you turn
around the wrong way they're all crushed. With the public art thing, you put
them up and you take them down, you put them up and you take them down, and
then they begin to disintegrate. Well, I decided it was becoming a performing
thing rather than making something that was more permanent. And I could certainly
see with Mike that he'd built up this big body of work, and I felt all I did
was accumulate all these pieces of material that then you had to get rid of.
But then, he had. . . . When was it 1979? 1980? That's when all the public art
furor over your piece in 1980.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: In Olympia?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yeah.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That would be '81.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Eighty-one. All right, by that time, that was it for me.
No more public art. I didn't want to have anything to do with public art.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: But you [were] still bought by people. Your individual pieces
were bought by the city or by the state or. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, yes, in a way, but the. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . so in that aspect of public art _____. It's not like
you're doing commissions for public buildings and. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: No. But the only piece that. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: By the way, you mentioned earlier that your work became one
dimensional. I should correct you, it's two dimensional.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, it could have gone. . . . It was going that way, though.
I thought, like, well, I was going to end up with nothing but light.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Or ideas.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And some people did that.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Absolutely right.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And I'm very attached to the physical aspect of it all.
So I decided, "Okay if I stick with painting or printmaking I can control
that."

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: But, Paul, it's interesting that. . . . Now, these are not
necessarily choices that people used to make but they're making them now. I
know my own students are particularly interested in knowing how to be known
as artists more than they are in how to be an artist, because there are so many
multiple ways of being an artist now. So I think-and this is just my opinion-but
I think Elizabeth is much more creative than I am but I'm a much better known
artist. And the reason is because of my choice of how I accumulated the work
that I did. And the reason she's not as well known is because she wasn't as
interested in having her art define her. I think you had more self-confidence
or something.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Or they'd see one show and they say well that's so different
from the last show.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And I did have this feeling like that every show had to
be a surprise. And finally I got to the point where I thought, "I can't
do this. I can't keep making these surprises. I need more time."

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: But now you see an artist like Sigmar Polke is actually doing
that as an aesthetic preference: trying to make every piece different from every
other piece or every drawing different from every other drawing.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, I'm going the other way now.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I'm trying to make things that are more similar and carry
over my thought from one paper to the next.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: But to get back to what Paul was talking about, I myself
find-and Elizabeth doesn't agree with me here-but I find that living with Elizabeth
and watching her work has had more impact on my work that any other experience
that I've had. I mean, it's like I've been to the Sistine Chapel, and I've been
all around Europe, and I've been to Mexico, and I've been to all the major museums
in the United States. And I still believe that when she does something that
clicks-and she does it quite often-it's an absolute butt-kicker for me. I mean,
it really makes me want to work. Aside from the fact that she's also saved my
life several times when I've been in difficulty with having a low blood sugar
and that sort of thing, she is the main reason why I've continued to work.

PAUL KARLSTROM: That's quite a tribute.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Except that. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: She doesn't believe that.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: For one thing, we talk about art all the time.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I've wondered about that, yeah.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: So that means that. . . . We go to so many shows that most
of them I cannot remember. But it also means we're always talking about why
that person would do what they did. And then how do we relate that to the whole.
And it's always interesting.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's my main interest. [chuckles]

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: So in that sense. . . . And Mike used to yell at me, you
know like, why didn't I learn anything from him? Why didn't I look at his work,
you know. Or why didn't I. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Is that right?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, I'm trying.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, now it wasn't that so much. It's just that you would
point out people that were getting some recognition, and I'd say, "Well,
can't you see that. . . ." They either were students of mine or they had
taken certain devices that I used and they were using them. And you didn't see
that so much.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: No.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: But at the same time, you see, you have this incredibly wonderful
independence-and a perversity just like myself-where you don't want to be influenced.
. . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And probably I think right at the beginning. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: But you are.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes. I can't help it. I can't help it.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: We both are. It's very reciprocal.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And it keeps getting more, sometimes it seems to me. But
at the beginning one of the reasons that I wanted to do sculpture, even though
I didn't have a whole lot of sculpture experience, was because it was completely
different. There was no chance of anybody mixing us up. No possibility of any
kind of comparison whatsoever. And that's why I kept my maiden name was because
we went to Mexico and I already was known or there were people that knew me.
I think I'd been painting probably. . . . There were enough people that knew
I painted or did things in high school so that I. . . . And also I felt I was
the last one in my family, so to speak. For a long time, it was like having
a split personality. You know, like sometimes I'm Mrs. Spafford, other times
I'm Elizabeth Sandvig, and some people don't know that they're the same person.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: [giggles]

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: That's all right. And so sometimes I think it would be better
if I used both names so that you could put them together in one person. But
I can't.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Does it bother you that it's the woman, often, that seems to
have to take the removal, the separation, to make sure that. . . . Say, even
in choosing medium, that this was your job or role-that Michael stays on true
course.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah, I don't think either one of us thought about it.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Because for one thing, I didn't really learn to paint in
college-with oil paint. So I came out pouring resin on wood. Big colors. Making
dams out of clay. Oh, it was the most wonderful stuff. And baking bread and
then pouring the resin over that. They're in the attic, but most of the bread
stuff has all fallen off.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So you weren't committed yet to one thing or the other?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I didn't have that. No. Huh uh. I didn't have that.

PAUL KARLSTROM: But you [Michael-Ed.] obviously were pretty early on.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, I think I had the idea that basically if I narrowed
what it was I was trying to do that I could probably do it well, if I just kept
at it.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm. Which goes back to what you said in the very beginning.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right.

PAUL KARLSTROM: And I was brought up like reading Picasso, you know-or about
Picasso-and thinking you can do everything. Anything.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Many of my students feel that way, too. Particularly the
women. They all want to be Renaissance people. They want to be able to do everything.
And they want to be excellent painters. They want to be excellent sculptors.
They want to be performance people. And I think it's great. At the same time,
eventually they just run out of energy, so they either have to do one thing
or they do nothing.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: You do have to sort of. . . . You do have to focus, I must
say. For a while I was committed to an idea. That is, that the idea is the most
important part of the work. And actually I don't feel that so much anymore.
I feel more maybe that the process feeds on the idea, but the process generates
those ideas, too.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, do you feel that you two over the years-through your
marriage and your association, let's say-collegial association-have really learned
from one another? I mean, I gather that's the case from what you say.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I don't know if you. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I think so.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Oh, yes. Yes. Sure.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Influenced? Learned?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And also, even things like. . . . It's amazing how much
you can forget. I mean, that you learn something once and then you can completely
forget it. And you need to be brought up and have it repeated. And Mike's good
for that.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: [laughs] Right.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And even things like technical things. I mean, like I'm
fine now. . . . I painted as big as I could and found that no larger than [eighty-eight,
eighty] by eighty. It doesn't suit me. It's too big for me. It's more than I
can manage. So that all the time I'm learning these things, but I wouldn't have
tried it if I hadn't had somebody to help me stretch the canvas. Him. So. .
. .

[Session 1, Tape 3, side B, is blank]

PAUL KARLSTROM: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. A second
interview session with Elizabeth Sandvig, Michael Spafford. This is tape 1,
side A, and we are, of course, continuing discussions that were begun here in
Seattle two days ago. The interviewer is Paul Karlstrom. Before we turned the
tape recorder on, we were talking a little bit about. . . . I was telling you
a story from my dinner conversation last night about a local collector who has
one of your paintings, Leda and the Swan. And without telling the story again,
it raised some what I think are interesting questions or issues, because he
told the story of how he acquired this painting, how he fell in love with it
basically. And love is the operative word here-or passion, if you will-because
he and his wife-they were not married at the time, they were courting let's
say-feel that your painting and the imagery therein played a special role in
their getting together. Or at least they're looking back at it that way. And
this gentleman knew we would be talking again and asked me to ask you. . . .
He said, "Why don't you ask Mike why his work is so erotic. Does he see
it that way?" So I thought we might just play with that theme a little
bit, because from what you've said, and what Elizabeth has said, is that the
work, especially at certain times, has been very much perceived that way and
has had in some cases quite an effect, in the way people respond to it, and
it's been, I guess, kind of interesting for you to watch it. What are your thoughts
on that?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: [laughs]

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: [laughs]

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, first of all, the term erotic has a certain connotation
that implies. . . . I think a better term for the word could be sexual rather
than erotic.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Because some people don't find it pleasant or erotic in that
sense. They find it quite disturbing. I think the reason that it has this sexual
look to it is because my primary interest in painting is to contrast a kind
of visual opposition. The way I came upon using mythology in the first place
was to have a kind of story or a kind of subject that would allow me to do this
kind of contrasting. And the nature with which I accomplish this, I set up systems-visual
systems-which are like figure-ground reversal-what they call figure-ground reversal.
And oftentimes there's a kind of symmetry also involved in the work. So it almost
functions like a Rorschach blot. So, actually, people see the sorts of things
that they're thinking about in the work. Now, if in terms of the subject matter
of Leda and the Swan, it's obviously what we term an origin myth, and it's Zeus
that turns himself into a swan. . . . Actually, in Ovid the metamorphosis, the
story is that the swan sort of waddles over to Leda and lays his head in her
lap, and she strokes the head a couple of times and then the swan walks off
and lays two eggs. You know, so it's not erotic at all. On the other hand, when
you read what William Butler Yeats did with that poem when he was in a very
erotic period of his life. He was, I think, thirty-four or something like that.
It's an incredibly sexual poem. It talks about the thundering beating wings
and the thrusting neck, and it's just. . . . And that's the sort of imagery
that I was trying to get into that series of paintings, of which [Ray-Ed.] Cairncross
has one. I think I like that kind of subject matter because it allows me to
make paintings look powerful, or look exciting, or look visually active. And
I think that all artists are interested in making paintings look visually active.
Elizabeth, with her work, is less dependent upon the subject matter than she
is upon, say, the surface of the painting, the use of the color. . . . She could
probably take any subject, regardless of what it meant, and make the painting
active, but I sort of need the subject to react against. And so if I think "Okay,
there's Leda. She's female. She's more or less passive. She's being. . . . She's
sort of. . . ." Let's see, I don't quite know how to put this, because
I don't want to sound sexist or anything, but the swan becomes very male. Leda
becomes very female. One becomes very active. One becomes more passive. It's
all a Yin-Yang, opposition type of thing. Now I could see a person who is, say,
involved in thinking about a relationship with some other person picking up
on that. I would hope they did. Do you have something that you would like to
add?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, I think at some time, at least maybe earlier in your
career-post student-you were maybe. . . . I think it was after you were a student,
you were interested in human origins and. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And sex!

PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckles]

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: . . . you tried these birth paintings and sex.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yes.

PAUL KARLSTROM: And it went together very nicely. [chuckles]

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And it was just very pragmatic, and for you sex was the
major thing.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: But I can also recall that it was the sort of thing that
people would react to-you know, the viewer.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So you were looking for [_____] stuff.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I was looking for something which would make people look
at my work.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: But also, then there was this other thing on the side, which
was the question of something being pornographic. And on the one hand, you didn't
want it to be pornographic, but we had friends actually who did. Who felt that
that would be a. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Right, an obscenity. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: . . . compliment for it to be pornographic.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You mean pushing the edges, the boundaries. Is this it?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Right. So then you think, well. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Although this takes me back to. . . . In 1967, I had a painting
removed from the Bellevue Arts and Crafts Fair. It was The Rape of Europa, and
there was a sort of a dustup in the paper. And I remember this woman that I
mentioned on an earlier tape, Teresa Fulton, was visiting us in Seattle at that
time. And I remember complaining to her about the fact that they were misinterpreting
my motives and all this sort of thing, and she thought that was nonsense. She
actually told me that it was easy to do work which would offend people-that
it was easy to be a pornographer-and it didn't take any artistic integrity whatsoever
and that I should be careful. And so from an early day I've been very, very
aware of the fact that this is a tendency that I have, maybe that I sort of
look out for. At the same time, I do it well.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: But also, in that period, in the. . . . What was that?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Oh, '67.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: In the sixties.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Just before we met Jerome [________-Ed.].

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: There were all these shows in Denmark, books, lots of shows
organized about sex or erotic art. And here were lots of photographs of people
taking their children to these shows, and the purpose seemed to be to make it.
. . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: To sort of expand.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Right. Expand the awareness and make it less. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Taboo?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: . . . secretive, less taboo, more sort of a normal part
of life. I mean, there were all this interest in nudist colonies and. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: So the sort of thing that we were doing seemed very mild
in a way. But probably the people that we were affecting were just that much
further removed. But I think probably. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: But then I think you did decide that you didn't. . . . The
reason you didn't want it to be pornographic in the sense of pornographic magazines
was because that would be so boring. I mean, that it was like a once. . . .
Seen once, seen all, that's it. There's no kind of aesthetic involvement.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I'm still introduced by students to their parents as that
pornographic artist who teaches at the university. But I don't think of myself
that way at all. As a matter of fact I consider myself to be quite the opposite.
I'm extremely principled and ethical and moral and you know. All my intentions
are absolutely above board without any, any. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: No. Never had any problems that way.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You said, Liz, that you during a certain time of doing paintings
with topless. You mentioned Rudi Gernreich.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Uh huh, at the [Remden, Railroad, Rembrandt].

PAUL KARLSTROM: Is this an imagery that you thought was amusing, fascinating,
timely, what?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: When was that bathing-suit business? Well, I don't know
why I did it exactly. I thought it was very funny. Actually, the shape of the
bathing suit was quite odd. And then I must. . . . But I did a lot of drawings
of topless dancers in glass boxes. I must have gone somewhere and seen it.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Go-Go.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes. And I thought it was quite extraordinary.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Did you see it as a kind of liberating imagery, or as a phenomenon
that had a positive aspect in terms of opening up? You used those terms earlier,
and this was the time. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I suppose so. But at the same time, like I can remember
being in college and going to look for somebody and knocking at the door, and
whoever came to the door had no clothes on and the whole place was full of people
with no clothes on. And I was quite shocked at the time.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Embarrassing.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And I think they invited me in and I just declined and ran
off as fast as I could go thinking this was beyond my abilities to deal with,
and I certainly. . . . And I think that happened also like when we were in Mexico
and we went to those foreign films. I went to see [Bernhill] films.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Uh huh.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Anyway.

PAUL KARLSTROM: What about the idea of the artist though as voyeur. I mean,
this is not a new idea I have, but we all position ourselves, somehow, either
as active participants-I think those are in the minority-and others of us are
attracted to different things-maybe lifestyles, behavior-but tend to hold back,
and it seems to me that-although this is your response, your tape, not mine-but
it seems to me that with many artists, they're observers. They watch the world.
They watch life. And there is a kind of voyeuristic role that is played and
then that is channeled and comes out in this form. Does that make any sense
to you?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's particularly true today, I think.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: It's a lot safer.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: When we were trained as artists, Elizabeth and I-or at least
when we developed our aesthetic preference-that was during the period of Abstract
Expressionism, and the formal aspects of art and the personal involvement in
the making of the art were the primary elements. At the present time, and before
that time, the kind of personal statement about where you are in your environment
and where you are in your psyche, these things are all particularly important
today. So virtually every artist is not exactly voyeuristic, but they're sort
of keeping a diary of where they are in history. Well, I don't feel like I'm
doing that. I think that Elizabeth is more now than she used to, but she's still
using an extremely formal basis for doing it. I have never painted anything
that has anything to do with my life. Unless you want to really stretch it and
say that I think of myself as Hercules or I think of myself as Perseus, but
I don't.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Do you agree with that?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Basically, except for a few little sketches here and there.
Few little animal sketches. A little scenery of Greece.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Oh, sure. I do Christmas cards and birthday cards. Sure,
I do that. But I mean when I'm working in my studio on my art. . . . And I was
going to say, in answer to another question that you had on your list here,
that probably even though I'm sure I've been affected by where I am in the Northwest
here, I'd probably be painting exactly the same thing if I went and taught in
Nebraska. I have a strong inner conviction that. . . . Or maybe I'm just. .
. . Actually, I'm sort of stubborn and I have very little imagination, and I
have this inner conviction that if I do the Greco-Roman mythology enough that
I'll eventually get a painting that'll last beyond my lifetime. And that's about
it, you know. And the fact some of them get attention and that some of them
affect people in a nice way, like your friends, or even if it affects people
in a sort of a negative way, relatively is unimportant to me.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I've wondered about that. I mean, there's not a goal of yours
to invoke this [thing].

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And actually he couldn't. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: And you're not a pornographer, by the way, because it seems
to me that's part of the definition of pornography is intended to excite if
it's effective.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Sure. And, by the way, I think-to get back to your earlier
question about the eroticism-the reason I picked up on mythology as a thing
to do is because when I was a student in the late fifties, I determined, by
discussing with friends and things, that painting and art were the same. I don't
believe that anymore, but I thought painting that dealt with real things was
not really art, but painting that dealt with metaphysical things was. And I
thought that probably that was the only way that you could deal with using painting
as an art form. So through some process, I came upon Greco-Roman mythology as
being a symbol of what was happening in reality. And philosophically I knew
that there were a certain number of myths that kept being repeated in culture
after culture. And I don't know how many of these-thirteen, eighteen different
stories-that these are still applicable to contemporary society. Even though
the technology has improved, we still have jealousy, we still have people interacting
in ways. . . . And so I remember thinking when I first did an Icarus, and it
was one of the themes that I did early on because I associated that with the
role of the artist-that the artist would be a person who always failed. We used
to discuss that all the time-that if you didn't fail, then you weren't an artist.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Because you were playing it too safe, is this what you mean?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You weren't trying?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right. You'd have to try to do something that you
were incapable of doing. And so you could associate that with Icarus because
his father told him not to fly too close to the sun but he went closer and then
he failed, you know. But he was trying to get higher. And I thought to myself
this also related not only to the idea of being heroic in the sense that you're
trying to do more than you're capable of doing, but it also was like somebody
loaning his car to his child and telling him to be careful. [laughs] And then
they go out and drink and smash it up. And it was happening all the time, all
these Icaran-or whatever the adjective is-these kind of Icarus-like things were
happening all the time, particularly in California.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: So that's the way I associated it in my mind. Now I know
that's not true, but I believe it.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: He can look at a vase of flowers and paint it, but it doesn't
have any feeling to it, or any intellectual tension, or it's just a little illustration
of flowers.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, that's another thing that I have as a flaw. I have
a strong illustrational capacity. I'm very, very skilled. And the mythology
thing for me was a way of concentrating on very basic, simple, formal things
that were happening, and I sort of eschewed the skill. I didn't use the skill.
I didn't want it.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Had to work hard to get rid of it.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right. I worked at least three years. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: It took at least two years to get rid of these skills that
you learn.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Some of it, yeah.

PAUL KARLSTROM: This was after you moved back here, do you think?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: No, this was in Mexico.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: As a commercial artist I learned to be efficient. I learned
to do things well and fast. And I learned to satisfy other people's expectations.
When I decided to work for myself, it was hard to stop thinking that way, to
think in terms of being inefficient, and to do a lot of destroying of things,
and work on things just for the purpose of working on them rather than for some
goal. And Elizabeth mentioned on another tape that I had this big studio in
Mexico. It was a whole building-no electricity, no plumbing or anything, but
it was just room after room. And I would put paintings on the wall, and I'd
paint in this room and then I'd go to another room and I'd paint in that room,
and, you know, just fill the whole building full of paintings. And most of them
weren't any good, but that was the way I worked it out. And we all used to do
this in the fifties and sixties. You'd stay up two days in a row-two days and
nights-and then you'd paint, because you'd be tired and you wouldn't have this
ability. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: You did. I did not.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Or you'd tie your brush on the end of a big stick, or you'd
paint with your unnatural hand.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Oh, yes, it was. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Or what I used to do was I'd have a painting on the wall
and I'd throw a bottle of Canada Dry soda water-they were in glass at that time-that
hadn't been opened-at the painting, and then it would explode. And then I'd
spend half my day picking up the glass. It was a way of somehow dealing with
. . . concentrating on what you were doing in a nonskilled way, just in a visual
way.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, was part of it also chance?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: You kept hoping, you kept hoping.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I mean it [was, wasn't] a goal at the time.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: You kept hoping that there was chance involved, but I also
philosophically sort of believed that there wasn't such a thing as chance and
everything was sort of preordained, but I didn't know how to put it in any format.
But I remember sitting-and I'm sure you did this too, Paul, when you were working-but
I would sit for hours finishing a painting in my head, that I'd be looking at
[if, but] I would have been working [on it].

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: No, I don't think other people do that. You do that and
you still do that, but I don't . . . I can't do it.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: You have to continually keep working?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, I can only visualize just a tiny bit ahead, and then
as soon as I do it with my hands it's different. So I can't do it. Maxwell Gordon
used to do that.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: What I find is that that process, while it's very, very inefficient
and probably wasteful, I always felt like if I didn't do that then my next move
wouldn't have been the same. You know, like it's all. . . . It's sort of like.
. . . I remember telling my students, they talk about, "Well, this is a
waste of time," or "This is a waste of time," and I tell them
that it's all like. . . . [It's a derivation, It's very Asian, Their evasion],
it's like a ripple. This is just a stone, and the ripples in the water and the
ripples go out and they meet the bank and somehow they all have an effect on
the bank." And it's like anything you do somehow has an effect on what
you're going to do next. That's obvious. So, I don't know what I was talking
about.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I don't either.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: [laughs]

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, a manner of working and the breaking down of skill. .
. .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Right.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Right, and the eroticism. And the eroticism, which to me
is more in the actual subject than it is in my work. I think my work, what I
try to do. . . . And it's another thing that I have problems with. My work has
a tendency to get too pretty. I'm so skilled that I can. . . . I'm a good designer
and I can just sort of take any number of colors or patterns and make them so
that they look good.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Like a good commercial artist.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right. That's absolutely correct. So I spend a lot
of time trying to make the work less pretty. Everybody has a governor, and I
don't know what yours was, but mine is, if the painting is not going well, it's
usually because I think it's too pretty. The subject matter allows me to come
back to what it is I'm really trying to do. I don't have to worry about how
the painting looks; I have to worry about how well I'm dealing with this subject.

PAUL KARLSTROM: And if you didn't have that, you would be a victim of your
design skills.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I would be totally seduced in the studio.

PAUL KARLSTROM: In the color. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right, I would be. . . . What do they call it? Some
kind of seduction.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I was thinking, you know, like when he said yesterday what
kind of plans we had, what we were going to do, and all I could think was I
didn't have any plans. One of the things that we did have, we always had in
the background, was Mike's skill as a commercial artist. That he could always
get a job doing commercial art. Now there was. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Which I know is totally out of date now, because. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: If I talk to the graphic designers at school, they ask about
computer skills and things like that, you know, and I have absolutely no knowledge
of that and no interest either. But I could be an illustrator. But it's a very.
. . . It's much more competitive than the field I'm in.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: [laughs] I don't know if that's true.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, that's an interesting thought.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: There are all these different levels of graphic [design].

PAUL KARLSTROM: Earlier we were talking-before leaving this subject of sexuality,
the imagery of your work and responses-and it seems that there have been-whether
you like it or not-there have been these responses and some of them have made
sort of unpleasant situations for presumably both of you. And this brings in
the whole, ideas about public art and so forth, but, Liz, you were saying earlier
that it seemed extraordinary, I guess, to you the way some people, especially
women, would at certain times respond to Mike's work. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Right, to his paintings. Yes.

PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . and then imagine, I guess, that they knew exactly what
kind of guy he was. I mean, what are your thoughts about that? Was this something
that was played. . . . Did this have anything to do with the dynamic between
you, or just what are your. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Oh, no. Well, since he was always nice to women that were
very enthusiastic about his painting, and he sets up so many defenses against
them personally. I mean, they always wanted to pursue this, but he has so many
defenses that I really didn't think much about them. So when one of these women
come up and compliment him and start ooh and aahing, I just disappear. And so
I don't have to, I don't really deal with it and I don't get jealous. Certainly
not. Sometimes I understand, and other times I don't understand it at all. You
know, like I mean I don't understand how they feel. I don't react the way they
do. I'm too close to the paintings, and they're too formal.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Liz, what I wanted to ask you, do you see the work that way?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, yes, some of the paintings. Particularly some of the
Leda and the Swan ones. I always take. . . . I identify with Leda. I never identify
with the swan. Most men identify also with the Leda.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Is that right?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Because it's a victim thing.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: It's a human. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And they're not that specifically male and female. They're
just different.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: But the swans are, somehow. . . . In some of the paintings,
swans are so aggressive, and it's such an attack that it always makes me feel
more vulnerable and that you have to protect yourself. It's sort of like the
difference. . . . I always think of. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: The government. [chuckles]

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: . . . Huckleberry Finn when. . . . Is it Huckleberry Finn?
When the aunt is throwing the ball to the little boy and he's dressed as a girl
and he closes his legs or he opens his legs.

PAUL KARLSTROM: But that's how he got caught. He got discovered. He got busted.
[laughs]

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, that's the way I always feel. You have to protect
yourself.

[Session 2, Tape 1, Side B ]

PAUL KARLSTROM: This is Session 2, a continuing interview with Spafford and
Sandvig. We'll start abbreviating. [laughs] At any rate this is tape 1, side
B, on September 4, 1992.
Why don't we continue with that line of discussion we really started on the
other side of this tape, with the imagery of your work, like the sexuality and.
. . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Let me say one thing about that. I alluded to the fact that
I selected the mythology as a kind of subject because I thought it had a relationship
to everybody's life. Even though it would have been metaphorical, it would have
been symbolic, it's still related to everybody. Well, I think the same thing
about sex. I think that regardless of how some people don't like to talk about
it or don't like to be confronted with it, virtually everybody is either a result
of some sexual act or they participate in some way or they choose not to. So
it seems to me, like sort of the height of hypocrisy for people to complain
about somebody being interested in sex.
Now, I happen to use it as a formal device. I mentioned on an earlier tape that
I have a tendency in my work-and I don't know where this comes from-to do things
that are phallic-not just sexual, but phallic. And this is described as being
more Baroque than Renaissance. It's not so much vertical and horizontal as it
is diagonal and dramatic. I think, oftentimes I don't even recognize it when
it happens. When it's pointed out to me, then I can see it. And it occurs to
me that a lot of people see this right away. The painting that brought your
friends together has a phallic nature to it, but it's not as phallic as some
of the work that I've done. But it has a kind of sinewy form on one side and
a form which is more tense on the other side, and it's very sort of black and
white and it's. . . . But I did a number of paintings which brought a kind of
a negative response from business people in the sixties. And one of these paintings
was a painting called Europa and the Bull, or The Rape of Europa, and I think
it was partially the title that bothered people.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: A lot of it.

PAUL KARLSTROM: This was the one over at Bellevue?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Right. And at that time, even though I was a member of the
board of directors of that fair, I was asked to remove the painting-or at least
the police were brought to remove the painting. And many of the people that
were involved with the fair wanted to make a big deal of it in the newspaper,
and I was very interested in just sort of not having it be an issue at all.
But it was interesting how it sort of blew up because the papers had got wind
of it and the TV got wind of it, and they began to interview the people on the
other side, the people who actually had objected to the work rather than the.
. . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: The Philistines. [laughs]

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, I know that's what a lot of people say, but I personally
don't think of them in that sense.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: It was funny. The kinds of comments were very funny.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: There was a man, and I don't know what his name was, actually,
but his store was Uncle Harold's Bike and Key Shop. The man is dead now and
I don't mean to say anything that's offensive about him but he was quoted as
saying. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, two women went and complained to him.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Right.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I mean, they'd been to the fair and they complained to him.
They didn't like this painting and they thought it was obscene and shouldn't
be there.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Right.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: So he went over and looked at it.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And he also felt like it was inappropriate for a show where
people bring their children.

PAUL KARLSTROM: And in a public area.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes. Yeah, outside in the shopping mall.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: It was outside, on easels. Right and that was before they
built Bellevue Square. So it was very much more open. It didn't have a roof
or anything.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: But what he said, which was quoted in the newspaper, was,
"It don't look like no Greek bull to me."

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Right.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: So you can see how the liberal press sort of took this guy
and. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And so somehow, you think, "Oh, Holy cow! What does
a Greek bull look like?" and so forth. And then when the TV came, Mike
wanted to show them the painting because there really wasn't that much to it.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I had the painting at home.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: But they wouldn't photograph the painting because if they
showed the painting, the controversy would die down.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Which I thought was really interesting.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: You know, they wanted the controversy because they can write
about it. So people could imagine anything.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: The reason I mention this is because a lot of the difficulty
that I had with my second public-art piece, which was the thing I did in Olympia,
The Labors of Hercules, was precisely generated this way. I mean, the people
had not seen the work but they were upset because they had heard that it was
obscene or they had heard that it was not appropriate or that they heard that
it cost too much money or something like that. And so they objected on principle.

PAUL KARLSTROM: On hearsay.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: On hearsay.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: On hearsay. But actually on principle, because like I recall
there was. . . . A lot of the objection came from the eastern side of the state
and there was a legislator there who sent out a newsletter, and in the newsletter
he wrote a question. It was a question that he wrote to his constituents, and
he said, "Do you want. . . ." Ahh, gosh, I can't remember exactly
what it said, but it was sort of like "Do you want pornography in your
state legislature, on the walls of your state legislature?" Now, if I'd
gotten that question, I would have said, "No!" Answered, "No!"

PAUL KARLSTROM: [laughs]

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: So I got some letters from these people-and some of them
were anonymous-saying how could I do this? Why did I put this pornography. .
. . They had never seen it. So that's sort of how the controversy developed.
Now it is true that a lot of the people who saw the work who were legislators
actually saw things that they considered inappropriate and pornographic. A lot
of this has to do with the phallic nature of my shapes. This particular piece
has a lot of figure/ground reversal. It's basically just a dark/light patterning.
Even though it's figurative, it's abstract.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes. In a way it was the abstraction that caused more difficulty.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, they saw images in between the images. Once again it
was sort of a _____tion.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: They made up the images that they saw. They began to invent.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: At the same time, the. . . . I intended to do this as a way
of keeping the piece active as a visual element. And I think that's really what
bothered them the most. It didn't sort of fade into the background and become
sort of like wallpaper. It actually was something that if they looked at it,
they became engaged in looking at it.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right. And, Paul, I have nothing against that. As
a matter of fact, my position was eventually-and I stated this publicly-was
that I would be happy to take the piece down. I'm not the least bit interested
in them having it if they don't want it. But what I didn't want them to do was
to resite it and say that they were doing me a favor by putting it in a more
appropriate place, because that was not true. And so, if they wanted me to take
it down, I thought it was incumbent upon them to destroy it. And I would be
very happy if that happened, and they could get any kind of visual Muzak up
there they wanted. It's their chamber.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Destroy it?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Sure. That would be what I would prefer to do.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And that's what we went to court. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Rather than moving it.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: That's what we went to court about.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, why don't you maybe sort of sketch that in, because I
myself don't know the full story. It's kind of famous around here. Just how
did it develop? What was the sequence?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Let me just digress a little bit. In 1978, I was given the
opportunity to do a mural for the Kingdome. I actually didn't apply for this
and it came as a complete surprise. As a matter of fact, I didn't. . . . I almost
just turned it down. I just figured it wasn't the sort of thing that I'd like
to do. It was a group of people that had met-Judy Whetzel and some other people-who
decided that because my work was so graphic. . . . And this was largely due
to the fact that I'd been a commercial artist, I think, and I think in terms
of value contrast and design structure. Rather than things being very beautiful,
I think more in terms of sort of structure. And so by seeing the work that I'd
done like that, they thought well if I did it big that it would look good. So
I had the opportunity to go to. . . . Actually, I went to Mexico that year on
sabbatical and I worked out a design for this mural. When I got back, I worked
with fabricators. I was one of the first artists to work with the Fabrication
Specialties in Seattle-and that's two men, Larry Tate and Gerald McGinness,
and they were both artists who started this fabrication place. And we did this
piece, put it up on the Kingdome, and I was very, very pleased with the way
it worked out. The public really had no particular knowledge about what was
going on. I selected a site in the Kingdome which was not one that would be
seen every time everybody came to a game. I wanted it to be a place that people
would go as a destination rather than just something they would see. As a matter
of fact, before that time there had been a competition for doing art at the
airport and I didn't even apply because I felt like that, even though there's
some wonderful art out there, I don't think it's an appropriate place for at
least the kind of thing that I would like to do.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, let me just ask why is that? Is it that people have other
business to conduct and they just pass by without much of a chance to. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah, once again it becomes sort of a background. And I think
it's important that you don't make people feel ill at ease when they're about
ready to fly off someplace. [laughter] I mean, this piece that I did at the
Kingdome is a tumbling figure, although people see it as a falling figure, and
if that were in the airport. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: There it wouldn't be so good.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: [inaudible]

PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, it's the wrong message.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Right. So at any rate, so I'm aware of that factor. Anyway,
that was in 1979 when I installed that piece, or early '80. The King County
Commissioner at that time was John Spellman, and he ran for Governor and became
Governor. During the time of Dixy Lee Ray, who was the previous Governor, there
was a program established to put art on the Capitol campus. This was a program
that was reinstituted. For years, ever since they built the building, they had
been trying to put art in the Capitol building. And there have been spaces that
have been designated for art ever since it was built. And I think it was built
in the thirties, wasn't it?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Um hmm.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: A number of artists previous to this time had submitted proposals,
and Kenneth Callahan was one of those artists, and I don't know if you interviewed
him about that or not, but he did a series of proposals that covered every space
in the building. I mean, it would have been an incredibly immense effort for
him to do this. And they were rejected. And not because they weren't considered
fine art, but because people couldn't agree if they were appropriate or not.
And so they had this history of maybe spending some money, getting proposals,
and then deciding that they couldn't agree on what they wanted. So we all knew
that this was the history of the process.
At the same time, in the late seventies when it started-I think it started in
1979 is when they started this process-to 1980, I guess, when we were selected,
the idea was that this would be a wonderful place to spend money on art to sort
of show how art was developing in the Northwest over decades. Like maybe they
would start with a project that Alden Mason and I were selected for, and then
the next project would be the dome area and then there were all these walls
in there. And they would do this over. . . . Every decade they would select
a new artist to do this. And it would become almost like an art history book.
And that was such a wonderful idea-and it was promoted primarily by a man named
Parks Anderson-that everybody sort of got into thinking that this was possible.
The process involved competing for being considered for this. They sent out
a very big printed brochure, and they sent it out nationally or internationally,
I guess. And it was a call for artists and a call for art in the legislature.
It wanted slides of work, a letter of intent, and then the jury would get a
short list and then they'd select from that list. And I wasn't going to do it.
As a matter of fact, even though I've received a lot of recognition and I've
done quite a few things, normally I don't try to do them. It just seems that
somehow I get involved in it. And in this case, I wasn't going to submit anything
but I was called by a person who wasn't on the jury but who was connected with
the process and they said they would really like to have me submit an application.
So I put together slides of the Kingdome piece, slides of my piece that was
rejected from Bellevue. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: That's fair warning. [chuckles]

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right. . . . .slides of a number of things that I
had done. Not the Leda things because they weren't in existence yet. But a number
of things that had a certain erotic quality to them and certainly a violent
quality. Labors of Hercules I had submitted. And in my statement of intent,
I said, "I would really like to do this. Thank you." [laughter] Okay,
so I made the short list and they finally broke it down into six candidates
who would be given money-I think it was fifteen hundred dollars to make a proposal.
And for the House of Representatives there was myself-I was one candidate-Norman
Lundin was a candidate, and the third was a man named [James-Ed.] Hansen.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Duane?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Duane.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: No.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Galo?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: No.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: No. Another Hansen. Robert?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: He's a sculptor.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: He's a sculptor and he. . . . There are so many Hansens here.
It wasn't Robert because he's down in California. He's at L.A. State, or was.
But, gosh, I should know. Anyway he has a number of sculptures on the Capitol
campus. And then for the Senate, there was. . . . Well, let's see Dale Chihuly.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And Dale Chihuly was also in there.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And Dale Chihuly was also being considered for the House
of Representatives. For the Senate there was Alden Mason and Lee Kelly, and
maybe that's where the Hansen piece was too.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Maybe that's where Hansen was.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And we prepared our proposals and then we were invited down
as a group to present our proposals to the jury. Now the intention of the jury
was to get art which would be, they stated, that would be good as art and not
just decorate the Capitol building. And they felt that they had communicated
with the legislators to the extent that they had . Some of the legislators
were ad hoc members of the committee. Everybody had the opportunity to participate
if they wanted to; at least they were given the information. Later on it was
said that they didn't have any facts and that they were surprised when they
got what they got. But everybody assumed that the process was done very well.
Although they're much more careful now than they were then. At any rate, I recall
that they were saying that there were a number of ways that they could award
this commission. The commission, by the way, was going to be for $100,000 or
less, depending upon how much you decided you wanted to do. So you had to put
in a budget as well as a proposal. They had the option that they could select
more than one artist for one of these rooms-so they could ostensibly give me
one wall, give Norman Lundin one wall, and give Dale Chihuly a table where he'd
put his glass; that was his proposal was to put glass in Plexiglas boxes around
the room-and split up the money. You know, give us each $30,000 and do it that
way. And I was aware of that. So when I made my proposal, I said that first
of all I was very interested in letting them know that I didn't want to share
the space with anybody, and that if I were selected that I not only didn't want
to share the money, I wanted to paint all four walls. And I think that Alden
Mason, who got the commission for the Senate, got paid exactly the same amount
of money as I did, but he only did two walls. And so it wasn't a matter of doing
a certain amount of work for the money; it was a matter of determining how much
money you wanted and then doing the work to cover that. And I was more interested
in controlling the space. I wanted to create a kind of visual experience that.
. . . And you can see that that's a very arrogant way of dealing with things.
I'm surprised now that I got away it. I just. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Maybe they were intimidated, you know, they said, "My
God, this guy must really be good. Look at his self-confidence!

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: But also the idea of having a different artist on every
wall, permanently, really is. . . . It would be _____.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Oh, it works in the Sistine ceiling-I mean, the Sistine Chapel.
I think that my thought-and I really think that this is true-I thought that
if I put enough roadblocks in their way that they wouldn't select me and that's
what I wanted was not to be selected. At the same time, I really wanted to do
it. But I didn't want to do it with any strings attached.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Also, we were involved in a group called TAG, which is the
artists group which actually wrote the legislation that was passed for the one-percent
program [1% for Art-Ed.].

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That was in 1971, that started. And I was president in 1973
of that group.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: So during those years, most of the things that were for
commissions went to sculptors. And once the people got these commissions then
we heard about how awful they were and how bogged down they got in bureaucratic
details and how they lost control to architects and contractors.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah, the contracts and. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: So he was aware of that.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So in other words, you were aware.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I was very conscious and I didn't want. . . . Actually, when
I finally got my contract, I had a lawyer go over it with me and we changed
things in it just so I could have as much control. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: As many things as you could.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Of course, it didn't work out but I tried. Anyway, I also
remember that-and I'm sure you

[ELIZABETH SANDVIG-Ed.] remember this too, you were there-I remember standing
up in front of this jury, which consisted of. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: No, I wasn't. I didn't go in there.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: You weren't part of the presentation?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Hm mm, hm mm.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, at any rate, there was Virginia Wright. . . . It was
what they call a perfect jury. It had an art collector. It had a museum person
or a curator. It had an artist. It had an architect.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Even had a photographer from Eastern Washington.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah. So the jury consisted of Virginia Wright. The architect,
his father actually built the building, Norm Johnston, and he was at the University
of Washington. There was a man. What was his name? The photographer.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Okazaki.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Oh, was it Okazaki? Okay, from Washington State University.
Parks Anderson, who was the artist. And I'm trying to think of who was the museum
person. Oh, it was the man from Ellensburg [________-Ed.].

PAUL KARLSTROM: What museum?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, he was at the college there but he ran the gallery
there. Oh, you know. He's now retired and he shows in San Francisco and he.
. . . Oh, I should know.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I know his name but I can't think of it. Anyway.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh, well, we can look it up.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Anyway, I stood up in front of these people and I explained
to them that I wanted to put the Labors of Hercules. . . . I had all these things,
by the way, drawn out-an inch to a foot so they knew exactly what it would look
like. That's my commercial-art training coming in, too. And I explained why
I wanted all four walls. For the Labors of Hercules I had six episodes on either
side. For the front, over the speaker's platform, I had an Icarus-type figure
or figure that rose and fell. And that was in a dual chromatic format, rather
than being more or less noncolorful. The Hercules ones are not black and white,
but they're described as black and white because they're largely dark and light.
And there is color that comes through the edges but you sort of have to look
close. And then on the back wall there was going to be this large Chimera, which
was also polyptychal. All of these things would be polyptychal. The Labors of
Hercules would be six episodes on one side and six episodes on the other, and
then the panel in the front would be six temporal sequence images of this figure.
It would be the same figure in six different forms. So that would be sort of
what we call a temporal sequence rather than an episodic sequence. And then
on the back wall. . . . The Chimera itself is an ancient Greek symbol for storms
or volcanic activity. And you've got to remember this was in 1981 that I was
presenting this idea, and Mount St. Helens had erupted not long before that.
And so the whole idea of the Chimera made a lot of sense to me and it's a very
polyptychal beast because it has the head of a lion and the body of a goat,
the tail of a serpent. And I was working it out so that it would be formally
polyptychal, too, because I would have some of the things on the wall. Partially
it would be the wall that would be. . . . The image that would work sort of
like in the Kingdome, where the figures become the wall that's behind the panels.
And then it would be an explosion of color back there. And I thought my God
what a beautiful sequence of visual information that would be there. And then
I started thinking about the political ramifications of these images, and it
fit so beautifully-in my mind-that I couldn't see any reason why it would be
considered inappropriate.

PAUL KARLSTROM: How do you mean the political, specifically?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: [laughs]

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Okay, okay. With the Chimera. . . . Today, the term "chimerical
thought," or something like that, refers to fanciful notions. You know,
something that is not really workable. And a lot of political rhetoric is chimerical.
So I thought, "Well, okay, that really fits." And at the same time,
it also has a kind of gerrymander aspect to it in terms of the way it looks.
And so I thought, "Well, that also fits." But the main thing that
I thought of was that the Hercules thing worked so well because it broke down
into twelve months, you know, or twelve labors. It broke down into these episodes
where this really well-meaning, not-totally-in-control figure was trying the
best he could to solve impossible tasks. And through compromise and making errors
and hurting people, he was able to somehow resolve these things. And virtually
every one of those labors
to some kind of political action. I wasn't thinking as clearly about that as
I just sort of felt it, until the trial began in 1987. But at that time, it
was explained that something like, say, Hercules fighting the [Lenerian, Linnerian]
Hydra was so much like, say, doing tax legislation, because with the Hydra every
time you'd cut off a head two heads would grow in its place. There was no way
to solve the problem except to somehow have somebody help you and to compromise
with the idea of not killing this thing but just burying it someplace. And it's
still out there and someday somebody'll find it and it'll pop out and do its
thing again.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And don't forget about Olympia.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That right. And of course, that I thought was an incredibly
appropriate tie-in because there's this wonderful temple of Zeus that was at
the Olympia Greece and one of its main attributes were the [Maenoepe, Medipe]
sculptures of the Labors of Hercules, and I thought, "Wow! What a great
opportunity to put Hercules in Olympia." When I mentioned this to one of
the legislators, who I won't tell you who his name is, but he didn't know there
was another Olympia! And he didn't know there was an Olympia, Greece.

[Session 2, Tape 2, side A ]

PAUL KARLSTROM: A continuing interview with Michael Spafford/Elizabeth Sandvig.
This is September 4, 1992. Interviewer is Paul Karlstrom. This is session two,
tape two. And Michael, maybe you just want to. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, we were talking about the fact that some of the legislators
weren't as involved in the imagery-at least philosophically, the way I was.
And, Elizabeth, you were saying that that was one of the things that surprised
you so much was the lack of. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, I don't know which time we're talking about.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, you said you went down to Olympia. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Even at the beginning, the attitudes that were expressed
within that building I felt were so anachronistic. I mean, here's this huge
building built out of marble, and the dining room for the visitors and the staff
was this cramped little dismal place in the basement. The hallways were full
of papers because the printing plant down there didn't have enough room. They
had leftover wires that were strung all over the place left from, in some cases,
Nixon's visit years before.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: So you didn't like the way it. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: It was a combination of tacky neglect and lack of consideration
for the employees combined with these grandiose statements that were sort of
like [this] [Victoria Emmanuel] monument. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And that's what I liked about it.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: . . . in Mussolini's period. You know, I mean, it was just
not. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: But, you see, that's what I liked about it. And actually.
. . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I didn't like it at all.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . for two years, from 1967 to 1969, Elizabeth and I spent
our time at the American Academy in Rome. And it's the same kind of place. I
mean, just faded elegance. You know, very pretentious but lots of cat fleas
and the curtains were all tattered and they wouldn't let children in to eat
there, and all of these rules and things. And yet it was terrific because it
was the kind of place. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Once you learned to get around all these rules.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, it was like you were there as a. . . . I don't know,
you could sort of role play in a place like that. And I thought the same thing
about the legislature when I. . . . Actually, I hadn't even gotten the award.
I remember Alden and I had taken our proposals down there, and we were walking
through the building and we ran across a person who does the tours and she was
talking about. . . . We introduced ourselves, and she said, "Well, I hope
you won't do anything to hurt the building." And we were both really surprised
that that would be the way she would respond. She said, well, she'd been there
for decades and that her whole family was involved in showing people through
this building. She actually pointed out pictures of Governor Langley in the
marble tracing in the wall. She had looked at it so long that she saw Governor
Langley and his wife and his dog in the marble. So she obviously had a great
love for this building; it was her life. And I heard later that she was terribly
upset by what we did in that building.

PAUL KARLSTROM: That you violated her. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right. And she felt like it was not art. She felt
like it was something which was working against what she loved. She felt like
it would have a negative influence on the people that she loved to show the
building to. And it wasn't just my piece but also Alden's. And much of the resistance
to the work has come from the staff at the legislature.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Comes from the tour guides.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Because the legislators themselves are only there for a short
time. Some of them are there for a long time, but many of them are just there
for one term or for two terms and then they're supplanted by another group.
But the staff-the people that more or less live there-they're the ones that
really objected. Anyway, Elizabeth, you were saying that when you went down
there that you were surprised at the narrowmindedness and the stupidity.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, I did things like. . . . I did things that were different
than you did. After the murals were done and up, I would go and sit in the gallery,
and the staff would be having a break and they would sit there and gossip about
each other and talk about the murals. And they were so nasty! Mostly they weren't
talking about the murals; they were just talking about each other. And I've
never heard such, such. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: But you also were responding to what the legislators. . .
.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, that was later. That was another time when I went
with Michael to photograph them, and we turned on the lights and some legislator
chased us all over the building screaming at the top of his lungs.

PAUL KARLSTROM: What?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And was so nasty and mean, and, I mean, I've never been
attacked like that and I didn't like it.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You mean, he knew that you were the artist?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I wasn't there.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: He wasn't there. I was there, with our son.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: It was our son. Michael, our son.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I understand, okay.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And so these people just shout out their gratuitous comments.
You know, most rude and kind of. . . . And ill-mannered and. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: They shouldn't do that, but I. . . . You were saying that
you felt like they were stupid and that sort of thing. I don't feel that way.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I didn't say they were stupid.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yes, you did. Maybe not on tape but you were saying that
just as the tape went off.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes, I did. That's probably quite true. I'm much more of
a snob than he is.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, it's not. . . . [laughter]

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I mean, I feel if you're stupid, you should at least keep
your mouth shut.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, but they have a different range of knowledge.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: True. That's certainly true.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I mean if I were going to, if somebody asked me about irrigating
for winter wheat in the Palouse, I would know nothing. And what they feel, what
many of the legislators felt, was that because they were sort of the caretakers
of the state and this was their palace that somehow their aesthetic preferences
should be bowed to.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Right, yes.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And that's why they had never gotten anything in there before
because they could never. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Agree.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Anyway, one of the experiences that I can relate is right
after I was selected to do the proposal-or not the proposal but the actual commission-I
was asked to come in to the Speaker's office to talk to John O'Brien, who wasn't
Speaker at that time, and the Speaker's name was William Polk. And Mr. Polk
I think was a landscape architect but he was Speaker of the House at that time.
And they wanted me to sort of talk about my proposal. Actually, I didn't know
what to think. Judy Whetzel was partially involved in this process too, and
her husband was either a legislator or a senator, Jonathan Whetzel, at that
time.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Um hmm, um hmm.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And so she told me about. . . . She said, "Well just
relax and go in and tell them what you're going to do," and that sort of
thing. So I did. And both O'Brien and Polk were sort of questioning why I did
what I did, or why I was proposing to do what I did. And I explained to them
what I told you about the political ramifications of these labors and the business
of there being an Olympia, Greece. And then one of them pointed out. . . . They
were looking at these one-inch-to-a-foot proposals I had, and one of them said,
"Well, what's that?" And he pointed to sort of a bulge between the
legs of Hercules and I said, "Well, those are his balls." And he says,
"Gosh, when that gets up on the wall it'll be the size of a basketball."
And I said, "Well, that's true." And he says, "Well, do you have
to do that?" I said, "No, no, I don't." I said, "I'll just
take it out." So I did. And then they were looking at it some more, and
I believe it was Mr. Polk, although I can't be certain of this. He asked me
why I didn't paint something that was more historical.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: O'Brien.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Was it O'Brien?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Um hmm.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You mean real history.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Um hmm, um hmm, yes.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's what they said.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And then he started to explain.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah. And I said, "Well, what do you mean?" And
he said. . . . And actually I knew what he meant, but he said, "Well, he
really liked the murals that were up in Victoria, and they showed the people
who explored the area, the Indians and stuff like that." I don't want to
put words in his mouth, but I think he said something like, "It would be
nice to have Lewis and Clark with the Indians perhaps presenting them a salmon,
or something like that." And I said, "Well geez, that's not history."
I said, "You know, I was thinking about putting something about. . . ."

PAUL KARLSTROM: That's mythology, is it not?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right, that's right.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Same thing.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And I guess I was being sort of nasty. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes. [said with a smile]

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . but I said, "You know, I was thinking about doing
Washington State history and the things that interested me were the IWW riots
in Everett and the Chinese massacre and, you know, all of these things that
happened in Washington State." And they said, "Oh, no, no, no, no,"
they didn't want anything like that. And I said, "Well, look, what you
want is mythology, and that's what you're going to get." [laughter] But
I think that that may have . . . not only did that sort of show them that I
wouldn't get pushed around too much, but I think it also sort of hardened their
resolve to somehow prevent this from happening.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, do you think it was then. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: John O'Brien, by the way, is very supportive of the work
now, and he was a very, very strong supporter when I was being attacked.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm. And he was the one that you were meeting with.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: He was the one that was questioning me.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And he was the one who was on the art committee and he was
very, very interested in getting art in Olympia.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah, it was his baby.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And when he had his birthday, they hung decorations all
over the murals and teased him about it.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Underwear. [chuckles]

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: You know, I mean it was. . . . The murals began to have
a life of their own. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, I can see that.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: . . . which we weren't involved in at all. And we would
not know any of these things until somebody would send us packages of strange
newspapers or letters or comments or . . . that we didn't want to know about.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Anyway, I should explain that the process was that we were
dealing with General Services Administration, which would be part of the executive
branch rather than the legislative branch. And the person who was administering
the program, who was. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Michael. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: He got fired. He didn't feel like he had to communicate as
directly with the legislature, so he was always telling me that everything was
fine. And it was a voucher situation where you. . . . Is that what they call
it when you. . . . I spent my money on materials and then I got money back.
And in the contract, it said that Alden and I had a year to do the work and
an extra year if we weren't able to complete the work, and that the money-or
at least he told me-that the money was unencumbered and that they couldn't spend
it for any other purpose so there's no problem about that. Anyway, so about
three months into the project-there was a lot of controversy going on in the
newspaper and people were beginning to object to the whole idea-I was told that
the biennium had come to an end and that they hadn't appropriated any money
for the next biennium for the murals, so that I would not be able to complete
the murals. That's why there are only two walls up there instead of the four.
I was told by people who were, people like the guy who's a congressman now,
the one who lived in [Montlake, Mountlake], the doctor with the beard.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Lowery?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: No, no.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: McDermott.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: [Jim-Ed.] McDermott. He was a member of the legislature,
and he and his wife were very supportive of the murals and they would tell me
sort of how to go about getting around these people who were obstructionists.
And Judy Whetzel was recommending things for me to do too. And other people
would come to my studio, which was down on Jackson Street, and sort of tell
me how to go about politically to sort of get around these people. Their thought
was that if I put up the Herc. . . . What I wanted to do was complete all four
walls and put them all up at once. They felt like if I did that they probably
would never go up. So they thought I should put up the Hercules walls that I
was working on, and then we would try to get the other two up. I realize now
that that was a mistake but. . . . When the Hercules walls went up, then the
shit really hit the fan. They really hated them. And I was told later that maybe
if I had put up something that had some color in it that they wouldn't hate
it so much, but I'm not sure that that's true, but. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: It's plausible but. . . .

[Interruption in taping]

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: So many things that went on that I can't possibly cover it
all, so I think maybe it would be a good idea to sort of break it off. And I
don't even think I put on there the fact that I specifically said to the jury
when the proposal was being considered that they should consider very carefully
selecting me because I did have this reputation for doing controversial work.
And so it was sort of like. . . . They said they didn't care.

[Interruption in taping]

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Richard Serra being supported by people that called his work,
they say it's like Michelangelo. You know, I mean, it's just. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Hm! A little hyperbolizing.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah. Oh, is that on? [the tape recorder-Trans.]

PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Oh yes, okay. Anyway, I was just saying before we broke it
off that when the proposals were being made to the jury, one of the things that
I was very, very careful about was to actually tell the jury that I had a controversial
reputation. They knew that. And my work had been considered controversial before,
that they had to be particularly aware of the fact that a lot of people didn't
like my work. And they said they knew that. And so when I was awarded the commission,
I assumed that I could do what I did. I mean, I wasn't trying to work for somebody
else like I might if I were a commercial artist. I was working just for myself.
Now I know that today most artists who work in the public arena are much more
sensitive to the people who are viewing their works and what they want ahead
of time. But I still feel that the best responsibility that an artist has to
his public is to do the best work they can, whether the public likes it or not.
Anyway. . . . [chuckling] The other way I think is more. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Let me ask you. I mean it's not entirely clear to me. Did the
public, whatever, J.Q. Public-John and Jane-hate this work, or was it more complicated
than that? You know I mentioned. . . . I suggested it might have come down to
a kind of turf war to a degree that you were viewed as perhaps being, not insolent
necessarily, but certainly intractable on the part of. . . . Do you have any
insight into how this developed? It became, from what I hear, quite a cause
célèbre here. The factions were aligned, and it's hard to imagine
that this would happen without some fueling and feeding and other things at
stake. You know what I mean? Just quickly, to try to make a national comparison.
. . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, there wasn't anything at stake really. The only thing
was. . . . One of the main things that had changed was an attitude which was
economic. And all of a sudden, there was less money to spend.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: No, I think Paul's right. I think that there was. . . . It
wasn't exactly a turf war, but it was like it allowed people who were more liberal
and people who were more conservative to somehow have something to talk about.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: That's true.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And just like, clear across the country this was happening.
You know, the religious right was developing as a political force.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I think of the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts-Ed.], obviously.
. . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Of course.

PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . and Jesse Helms's motives, which are perhaps not as apparent
as some people think. So, you know, it's not clearly sex and art.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: No, he was just trying to take the heat off the tobacco industry.
You know, he was. . . . [laughs]

PAUL KARLSTROM: I was just wondering if. . . . When I said, you know, "something
else at stake," I'm wondering if there was anything here of a perhaps political
nature lining up?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, the legislature itself was having this big fight about
money.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right. It was a period of economic downturn.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: All of a sudden there was a downturn. There was no money
for chore services for the handicapped, and that became an incredible focus.
And then they said they shouldn't be funding art; they should be funding the
poor and. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, it wasn't even that direct though, it was like. . .
. I would call it being described as the mural served a purpose that went beyond
the original intent, and that was that it was something that both of these factions
could talk about and dislike.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes. That's true.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: So they could agree on it. So apparently at that time the
conversation between the two aisles-the Republicans and the Democrats-was so
acrimonious that people were actually getting death threats. I mean, they were
very, very angry at one another.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And fighting and. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: But when it came to the murals they could agree that they
wanted that shit out of the House, you know. So it sort of gave them an area
that was almost like a no man's land that they could discuss and agree on. And
I thought that was terrific.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: They could discuss it and make jokes and all kinds of things.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That was very, very good.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes. It was. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: But to get back to the idea of it being sort of a symbol
for the difference between the more liberal element and the more conservative
element. That breaks our state down into two areas, too, because Seattle is
considered sort of "Sin City" and where all the liberal, bad ideas
are promoted. And then the eastern side of the state-and some of the smaller
communities in the state-is considered more basic or which we'd call "family
values." And that's always been true. The murals, once again, were able
to sort of focus that difference.
Now, I don't think that what happened to me had anything to do with what happened
with the NEA or anything like that because. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Mapplethorpe's _____.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Basically, I was not censored. I did a work of art and the
people didn't like it. And that's not the same as being censored, saying, well,
"You can't do this," or, "You can't do that."

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: But it was covered up.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's true, but it's not. . . . They covered it up because
they didn't like it. I mean, that's not the same as saying there's certain things
that you can do and certain things that you can't do.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: That's true. And in fact the obscenity claims were made
because that's the best way. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Right, to rally support.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: . . . to say that you don't like something is to call it
obscene.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, actually in the contract. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, but there lies a very important similarity, because this
is what's used to try to generate the support and opposition of whatever little
art _____ project.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Right.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: There was one state senator-Richard Bond-who sort of led
the fight against the murals, and he genuinely did feel a sense of outrage about
the murals. He was a born-again Christian, which I have no objection to whatsoever,
but he was also an ex-Marine and he genuinely felt like the murals were filthy.
And when I think back on it I think well he probably felt some guilt about whatever
he did as a Marine. He undoubtedly had all these things bottled up that he could
sort of . . . they were brought out by how he felt about the murals.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Do you remember his card?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, it said. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: He sent you a card?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: No, no, it's a business card.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: It's a business card and it said. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: It just said Richard Bond. Was it Bond, or no? What'd I say?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yeah. Bond. Yes.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Is it Bond? I think it was Richard. Anyway, and then it said,
"Christian."

PAUL KARLSTROM: There was a phone number? And an address?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I thought it had more than that.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Pearly gates.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: But, like I say, I don't object at all to that, but they
objected to the murals because they were non-Christian. They were pagan. They
were Hercules. They were pre-Christian. You know, they were all these things
that they could relate to Satanic. . . . You know.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Right. So once they were noticed. . . . I mean, it would have
been okay if somehow attention of this nature hadn't been caused, but as soon
as there was some attention paid and there was publicity then, as you said earlier,
even those who didn't actually see the works or the images drew these conclusions.
. . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right.

PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . and felt threatened, became outraged. Do you see this
as a fairly typical pattern in this kind of thing? That it's less a direct confrontation
with. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah, that's right. They don't look at them.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I hear that this is bad. It's anti . . . it's unreligious and
so forth.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Sure.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yeah.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So this is then basically what happened. This was the phenomenon
that. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: But on the other hand there were numerous supporters, and
they would generally write about what a fine teacher I was. They'd talk about
the University of Washington. This would just add fuel to the fire to the people
who didn't like the work because the University of Washington was a place they
would not send their children because of all the sin that was there. You know,
in other words, the people who supported the murals put a spin on all the things
I was that was good, and those same things were considered to be evil by the
second group.

PAUL KARLSTROM: How did it resolve?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, it resolved itself by them covering up the murals and
refusing to let me complete the murals. In 1987, they passed a resolution to
take them down, and Alden Mason sued the state trying to get an injunction against
them taking down his murals. And I was in Europe at that time, and my gallery
[Francine Seders Gallery-Ed.] joined in the suit on my behalf. And so when I
got back, we all went to court together. And the state won. Even before the
trial began, they were given the right to take the murals down. Then the trial.
. . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: He was a wonderful judge.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah. Terrence Carroll.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: But no, the preliminary judge, that was a woman.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Uh huh.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Don't you remember?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Right, but she didn't make that ruling. Carroll made the
ruling that. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: But she did this wonderful explanation about it. It was
the most succinct thing we heard in at least, in five years.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You mean, it really was wonderful?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: It really was.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes. She was very, very clear. I was trying to think. Was
it Barbara. . . . [Jacobs Rothstein-Ed.]

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I can't remember her name either but she was good. She made
all the issues very clear. Anyway, after Carroll had made some kind of preruling
that the state could not be prevented from taking the work down. . . . In the
contract, to get back to what Elizabeth was saying earlier, the contract had
a provision in it that said that the Legislature could not stop the production
of the murals for aesthetic reasons. There had to be something nonaesthetic.
So they went to pornography and to economic reasons as a reason to stop the
murals. And this was supposed to be nonaesthetic. And that's how they stopped
them. But in the contract it said that the murals could not be altered, damaged.
. . . There were all kinds of things like that.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Right. But it didn't say they couldn't be removed.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: It didn't say they couldn't be moved.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Or removed.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: So the judge said since it wasn't in the contract that they
couldn't be moved, as long as they could prove that they weren't going to change
them in any way. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: They could move them.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . then they could move them. Our defense was that they
were site-specific and that they were designed specifically for that space and
if they were moved it would change them. But he didn't buy that, so. . . . Anyway,
as the upshot was. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: So just like Icarus, you failed.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That's right, that's right, except that what happened was
because I had put them up with the intention of them being up very, very sturdily
partially because of the earthquake business and everything. . . . Alden had
painted his on canvas and had them stretched and they were hung on hooks. Mine
were on [Indio, indio] plywood, laminated canvas, and adhered to the wall with
industrial cement.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: [laughter] Yeah, that's right. It was ruled by the judge,
Terrence Carroll, that the piece could be moved as long as it wasn't damaged.
And so our defense was that they couldn't be moved because they were site-specific
pieces. But he finally ruled that they could. Luckily, the way I put up the
murals made it very, very difficult, if not prohibitively expensive, to move
them without damaging them. Alden Mason's murals, unfortunately, were painted
on canvas, and they were hung on hooks, and so as soon as this ruling was made,
they took them down. It took them half a day, and they just went in there and
they took them down and put them in storage.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: You didn't explain that one of the things that's happened
in the meantime was that they hired a designer and they spent, what, a million
or so to redo the Legislative Building.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: That was for the Centennial. Right.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And they gold-leafed everything. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Three-and-a-half million dollars, they spent.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Three-and-a-half million. They bought new carpets, hand
done in England with patterns of rhododendrons.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Actually, it's quite beautiful. You'll have to go down and
take a look at it.

PAUL KARLSTROM: But this was at the same time they were. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: No, this was after.

PAUL KARLSTROM: This was afterwards.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: This is another governor.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So there were no longer the economic issues.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: No.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: No, no, there never was. The judge ruled that that was all
artifice and subterfuge, and he awarded me the rest of the money during that
trial.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: But so here the building had all been done. So the reason
they wanted Alden's down was that the colors didn't go well.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: They said they didn't match the decorative scheme.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: It didn't match the new decoration.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And they looked beautiful there.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: So they took them down. So Mike's, even though they didn't
match the decorative scheme, actually. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: They do.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: . . . they couldn't take them down because they were stuck
to the walls. Now they had been covered up with wooden walls for how long?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Five years. Or seven years.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: So the judge ruled they were to be uncovered. Right?

PAUL KARLSTROM: This is a second trial, now?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Same trial.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Same trial?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Same trial, right. So, see, the murals went up in 1981 and
the trial was in 1987. After the murals were up for less than a year, they were
covered. And then they were covered until the time that they were. . . . Alden's
had never been covered. His had never actually been criticized.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Nobody ever said anything. [laughs]

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: As soon as this building was remodeled, then they decided
they didn't want any of this junky art in there so they passed this resolution
that all this art should be taken down, and the ruling made it possible for
them to take Alden's down right away. And then what they did was they had an
estimate made by experts about how. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: . . . .to take his down.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . how to take mine down without damaging them, and I
think that. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: They made little films.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah. It was incredible.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And they showed the judge. And they were so funny; nobody
would pay any attention to those films.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: The way my murals went up, they have. . . . This [Indio,
scindio] plywood comes in five by nine sheets, and they were jigsawed and the
canvas was sometimes laminated over the top of these joints and sometimes it
wasn't. And so it was really difficult for them to know where to put something
under it to pop it off without damaging the rest of it. They came up with a
figure of something like $300,000. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: . . . .to take them down.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . as a possibility for the amount of money it would take
to take them down. But then they would have to, according to the judge, they'd
have to have an expert check them every two or three months while they were
in storage to make sure that they weren't getting mildewed or. . . . [laughs]
It was ridiculous! I mean, I would have been perfectly willing to go down there
and just rip them off and toss them. But they these. . . . I mean, they really
were very hypocritical. They kept saying they didn't like them but they didn't
want to destroy them because they might be worth something someday. [laughs]

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: So some people. . . . Everybody had a different opinion
like, "Well, maybe we can sell them to another state."

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Yeah, right. Or they were going to put them in a cow barn
at the Puyallup Fair. You know, they thought they would look good there. But
at any rate they weren't able to take them down, so the judge suggested that
they leave them up, leave them uncovered, and have the public respond to what
they thought of them. And so they left them uncovered for something like four
months?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Right, and now meanwhile, we had a new Speaker of the House
or leader-Joe King?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Joe King, right.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And then new people like. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Sure, lots of new legislators and. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And the Henry Gallery. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And the arts. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Richard Andrews. Well, he went down there and spoke to Joe
King and spoke to the Legislature and convinced them all to. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: And Richard, of course, had been in public art at the NEA
for many years, and he was very involved with the Richard Serra thing, and there
became a kind of a. . . . Actually the judge-not the judge, the lawyer that
wanted to. . . . One of the lawyers that I was going to use is a blind man who
practices down in Portland. He's a famous art lawyer. And he actually was part
of Serra's team also. So we didn't use him finally.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Well, we did for the first part of the trial-for the preliminary.
But then it was too expensive.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Interesting fellow. He was an artist as a young person and
he was mixing chemicals and it blew up and destroyed his sight. But he's considered
a terrific art lawyer because. . . . Duboff, not DuBois.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Is it Duboff?

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Yes, that's right. Uh huh, [Leonard-Ed.] Duboff.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: He's considered a terrific art lawyer because he can't be
shown to have a bias, a visual bias. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Because he can't see it. [chuckles]

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: . . . because he can't see it. At any rate, Joe King finally
decided not to bring the issue of taking the murals down again to the full House.
He had the executive committee of the House of Representatives make a decision
that the murals should not be voted on again. And by doing that, they stayed
up. And they're still up. And actually they look very good, but people still
don't like them.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Some people like them.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Some do, but most don't.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: And lots of things happen where a group of Russian tourists,
somebody will ask, "What will you explain about these?" And then the
tour guide says. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: I know. But you had quite a track record, you keep forgetting.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Well, anyway.

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Everybody in Washington state has an opinion about everything,
I think, you know, so. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: In terms of how it affected. . . . I think it had a really
strong effect on this whole burgeoning kind of art, public art thing that was
happening in the state of Washington. And I think that's really interesting
because Elizabeth and I were very much involved with the TAG [The Artists Group-Ed.]
group in 1971 that set up the original ordinances for the public art ["1%
for Art program-Ed.]. And then we got involved in a kind of a different way
with the murals. And what it did was it changed the process for selecting art.
And it brought it more into the nineties-or into the eighties-and there is a
strong sense of somehow communicating with the people that you were doing the
art for that didn't exist before. And that's probably why I wouldn't operate
quite as well today as a public artist as I had an opportunity to in the past,
because I am basically very selfish and. . . .

ELIZABETH SANDVIG: Right. Well, one of the things [that-Ed.] happens is that
now for every public art project, there's a public dialogue, usually before,
during, and maybe a little bit after. But usually what it involves is canvassing
people and then going to lots of meetings. And people spend hours and days and
days in meetings trying to decide what's suitable and whether art has a healing
effect or not. And then it ends up usually with what the architect decides,
rather than. . . . You know, they can change the color at will. Or sometimes
the architect installs something of his own. So it doesn't always work.

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: But there were many people who were upset with me because
of my intractability, and I'm not going to mention the person actually, but
there was somebody who was very highly positioned in the state who asked me
the question. He said, "If it were proven to you that your murals-or your
attitude about your murals-are leading to a total, say, the removal of the art
budget for the rest of Washington state, would you retract? I mean, would you
let them do what they want to with the murals?" And I said, "No."
I said, "That's their business." I didn't care about the effect on
other artists. And they got so upset! [laughs] But, of course if you say yes,
you're doing the worst thing. I mean, you're compromising and you're playing
into the hands of people who want to just sort of control. It's more a power
thing than it is an aesthetic thing. So they certainly don't have to choose
me to do anything, and they don't have to like it once I do it, but I shouldn't
have to do things so that other people, you know what I mean, so that they will
fund other people.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, you don't see the artist as a team player?

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: I think some artists work wonderfully in terms of teams.
I can't even work if there's somebody in the same building. But no, that's not
exactly true. I use the same fabricators for the murals in Olympia that I did
for the piece in the Kingdome, and they're wonderful. I love to work with them
as a team and they had lots of suggestions, and. . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, I think more of what I meant was operating in terms of
a community with shared interests, that you don't feel it's the job of the artist
to primarily be looking out for the, in this case, compromising in order to
supposedly have a better. . . .

MICHAEL SPAFFORD: Actually, Paul, I do feel that the artist has great responsibility
this way, but I feel like that responsibility is best served by doing art that
has energy and strength rather than trying to. . . . I've seen so many young
artists that are very, very talented who go out and do awful art because they
think they're doing something good for the community. And that does disturb.
Anyway, do you suppose that's enough?

PAUL KARLSTROM: Yes. Thanks so much to both of you. Maybe we'll have another
opportunity to discuss some of the other issues. Thank you.

[End of interview]

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Michael Spafford and Elizabeth Sandvig, 1992 September 2-4, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.